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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2019 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


httos://archive.org/details/sourcesofdoctrinOOtenn 


THE SOURCES OF 
THE DOCTRINES OF THE 
FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 


BY 


Ve 
F. R. TENNANT, ΜΊΑΣ, B.Sc. 


FORMERLY STUDENT OF GONVILLE AND CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 


- CAMBRIDGE : 
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 


1903 


Hondon: C. J. CLAY anv SONS, 
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, 
AVE. MARIA LANE. 

Glasgow: so, WELLINGTON STREET. 


=—s 


τ i [5:3 ἦν ne 


Beipsig: Εἰ A. BROCKHAUS. 
Kew Work: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED. 


[All Rights reserved.| 


THE SOURCES OF 
THE DOCTRINES OF THE 
PALL AND VORIGINAL SIN 


BY) TE ESA” AME he 


The Origin and Propagation of Sin. 


Being the Hulsean Lectures delivered before the 
University of Cambridge in 1901--2. 


TO MY WIFE 


τὰν Βα 


1s the preface to my recently published Hulsean Lectures 

on The Origin and Propagation of Sin, which treated 
the subject described by their title critically and inductively, 
it was stated that the results of a historical study, then not 
completed, of the sources and development of the doctrines of 
the Fall and Original Sin, were inevitably presupposed 
throughout that work. These results are now placed before 
the reader. 

The purpose which their publication is hoped to fulfil is 
twofold. In the first place, such a historical inquiry as is 
here undertaken furnishes one criterion amongst others as to 
the validity and finality of the doctrines previously criticised 
and restated; and thus the present work embodies an argu- 
ment supplementary to those offered in the Hulsean Lectures. 
Secondly, it is hoped that some small service may be 
rendered to the student of doctrine by collecting together, into 
small compass, the literature, both ancient and modern, 
dealing with the sources of the Hebrew Fall-story and with 
the growth, from that narrative, of the Jewish and Christian 
theories concerning the origin and diffusion of human sinful- 
ness. This hope is the more confidently entertained, partly 
on account of the fact that no complete history of the earlier 
growth of the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin has 
previously been supplied, and partly because the inquiry 
prosecuted in this volume has been allowed to assume more 


Vill Preface 


minuteness and exhaustiveness than was perhaps necessary 
for the purpose of merely furnishing an argument supple- 
mentary to such as were elaborated in a former work. 

The literature which it is here attempted to collect and to 
review is indeed scattered, and requires to be sought in books 
dealing with numerous and diverse branches of theological 
study. Hence the need for the labour of gathering it syste- 
matically together. Hence also the need, on the part of him 
who would endeavour to fulfil such a task, of recourse, through- 
out the work, to the results of the investigations of specialists 
in each of the departments of learning that are involved. 
This need is the greater when one who takes the work in 
hand cannot claim to be an experienced student of any of 
these several branches of theology, but must confess himself an 
amateur in all of them; when he is therefore unable to write 
with that confidence and independence which are born alone 
of minute and specialised first-hand study. 

I trust that my indebtedness to the authorities from whose 
works I have gathered information has always been acknow- 
ledged in the appropriate place. How much I owe to German 
scholarship will be very evident to the reader of my book. 

There is another kind of help, however, which I have 
derived, not from published works of writers, but from direct 
and personal communication; and this calls for more par- 
ticular acknowledgment, such as can more fittingly find 
expression here. The generous readiness of both friends and 
strangers, not only at Cambridge but at other universities, to 
place at my disposal the best of their knowledge and to give 
me unstintingly of their time and thought, has placed me 
under an obligation which it gives me genuine pleasure to 
acknowledge. Information otherwise quite inaccessible has 
thus been very kindly afforded me by Profs. Sayce and Cheyne 
of Oxford, Prof. Otto Pfleiderer of Berlin, Prof. W. Max 
Miiller of Philadelphia, Prof. Swete, Prof. Bendall and the 


Preface ix 


late Prof. Cowell of Cambridge, the Rev. A. H. Moulton and 
Dr Schechter, both until recently of Cambridge, Dean 
Armitage Robinson, Dr E. W. West, Mr Morfill of Oxford, 
and Mr N. McLean, who also kindly allowed me access to the 
late W. Robertson Smith’s collection of books at Christ’s 
College, of which he is the librarian. 

My thanks are also especially due to my old friend the 
Rev. J. H. Srawley for finding time, amidst great pressure of 
work, to read through my last three chapters while in manu- 
Script, and to offer me many valuable suggestions with regard 
to them. 

I have further to acknowledge the kindness of the editors 
and the publishers (Messrs Macmillan and Co.) of The Journal 
of Theological Studies in allowing me to reprint extracts from 
an article contributed to that periodical. Finally, I have been 
materially helped at home in the correction of the proof- 
sheets, the verification of references and the compilation of 
the indexes. 


ΠΝ ΠΝ ΑΝΝΑ: 


HOCKWOLD RECTORY, 
Fuly, 1903. 


{Ὁ Ne NCES: 


CHAPTER I. 


THE FALL-STORY AND ITS EXEGESIS. 
Introductory—The Jahvist Document, its date, theological stand- 


point, style, composition—Exegesis of the narrative of Gen. iii. 
—Literary criticism of the Fall-story—Oral tradition 


Cis (at venga IB 


PAGE 


THE ETHNOLOGICAL ORIGIN AND RELATIONS OF THE FALL-STORY. 


Present state of comparative study of sacred legend—Elements of 
Fall-story derived from early religion of nomadic Hebrews— 
Phoenician parallels—Egyptian parallels— Babylonian parallels 
—Greek parallels—Iranian parallels—Indian parallels—Con- 
clusion | 


Os Wid ΟΝ ἘΓΓῚ: 


τ 
i) 


THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN OF THE FALL-STORY: ITS RELATION 


TO HISTORY, ALLEGORY AND MYTH. 


Traces of legends about the first man and Paradise in O.T.— 
Psychological origin of conceptions of the Garden of Eden, 
a golden age, the trees of Paradise—Fossil conceptions im- 
bedded in Fall-story—Hypothetical reconstruction of early 
history of Fall-story—The story neither history, nor allegory, 
nor, in the strict sense, myth 


61 


X11 Contents 


Gis OMe dC; 


THE PREPARATION IN THE OLD TESTAMENT FOR A DOCTRINE OF 
THE FALL AND OF ORIGINAL SIN. 

PAGE 
The use of elements of the Fall-story in the O.T.—Absence in O.T. 
of any doctrine derived from it—An alternative O.T. source of 
speculation on the origin of human sinfulness—Growth, in the 
-O.T., of ideas involved in the doctrine of Original Sin— 
Universality and inherence of sinfulness—The{yezey) : - els. 


CHAPTER V. 


rn a Se 


SIASTICUS OW SIN AND THE FALL. 


THE TEACHING O 


Introductory—Place of Ecclus. in Jewish literature—Its teaching as 
to Sin, the Fall and its consequences, Death . : : . 106 


Chere DE Re Vale 


THE PREPARATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE FALL IN 
ALEXANDRIAN JUDAISM. 


The Sibylline Oracles—Wisdom—Philo—The Book of the Secrets 
of Enoch (Slavonic Enoch)—Note on 3 and 4 Maccabees Ἐν ἦι 


to 
i) 


CrP TER Vi 


THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN IN RABBINICAL LITERATURE: 


Date and nature of the Rabbinic literature—Its teaching on man’s 
first estate and fall—The tempter—The Fall-story regarded as 
symbolically descriptive of a sin of unchastity—Crude notion 


t a doctrine of Original Sin Ξ : a 


CITA rR ΤΗ͂Ν 


THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN IN JEWISH PSEUDEPIGRAPHIC 
LITERATURE, 


istics of apocalyptic literature—I. The (Aethi- 
i (2) The groundwork—lIts Theodicy 
r€nd of the Watchers: (ὁ) The Similitudes : 


Origin and charg 


zrounded on the | 


Contents ΧΙ 


PAGE 
(c) Interpolations—1I1. The Testaments of the Twelve 
Patriarchs—IlIl. The Book of Jubilees—iv. The Apocalypse 
of Abraham—v. Pseudo-Philo—Note on The Assumption of 
Moses, The Psalms of Solomon, The Testament of Abraham— 
v1. The Books of Adam, (a) The Apocalypse of Moses: 
(ὁ) The Vita Adae: (c) The Book of Adam and Eve (Malan) 
or The Conflict of Adam and Eve (Dillmann): (@) The Treasure 
Cave: (4) The Apocalypse of Adam or The Testament of Adam 
and Eve: (73) The History of the Creation and of the Trans- 
gression of Adam: (g) Fragments of late Adam-literature— 
vul. The Greek Apocalypse of Baruch . , : 7 


cole lo alse Τὰ 


THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN IN JEWISH PSEUDEPIGRAPHIC 
LITERATURE—(continued ). 


vill. The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (Slavonic Enoch)—Its 
unique doctrine of Original Sin—1x. The (Syriac) Apocalypse 
of Baruch—x. { Bara Ye Esdras)—Its relation to the last. 
work and to S. : : : ; : : 


Appendix to Chapter /X.—Incidental Allusions to the Fall in 
undoubtedly Christian Apocryphal Writings . : ι eee 


leat, CN: 


THE GROWTH OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE FALL, AND OF ITS 
ELEMENTS, IN JEWISH LITERATURE AS A WHOLE. 


Usage in Jewish Literature of the Fall-stories of Gen. vi. I-4 and 
Gen. i11.—Development of Doctrine from Gen. ili.—Summary Ϊ 
of Jewish teaching on Adam in the unfallen state, The Fall and 


Death, The Tempter, etc. . ; : : : : : a} Fork 


POTN ELE Riapx: Ie 


S. PAUL’S DOCTRINE OF THE FALL. 


The endeavour to interpret S. Paul in the hght of contemporary 
Jewish thought—Discussion of Rom. v. 12 ff. and its exegesis— 
Rom. vil. 7 ff. on the psychological source of sin—1 Cor. xv. 
45-50 irrelevant to our subject—Effects of the Fall on Nature— 
Dicta of S. Paul embody results of previous Jewish speculation 248 


X1V Contents 


ΡΝ Ais 


THE DOCTRINES .OF THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN IN THE FATHERS 
BEFORE AUGUSTINE. 

PAGE 
The actual sources of the ecclesiastical doctrine of Original Sin not 
wholly identical with those of corresponding Jewish teaching— 
New sources appear in Irenaeus, Origen and Tertullian—The 
Doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin in 1. The Apostolic 
Fathers—1I. The Greek Apologists: Justin Martyr, Tatian, 
Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras—III. Irenaeus—Iv. The 

Early Alexandrines: Clement, Origen  . : : 3 


CEA FTE Rie x ΤῊ 


THE DOCTRINES OF THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN IN THE FATHERS 
BEFORE AUGUSTINE—(continued). 


Vv. Methodius, Athanasius and Cyril of Jerusalem—vi. The 
Cappadocians: Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of 

Nyssa—VviIl. The Antiochene School: Chrysostom, Theodore 
of Mopsuestia— Vill. Tertulliaan—i1x. From Tertullian to 


Augustine: Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose—Conclusion : .* 307 
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS ; : : : : : . 370 
INDEX OF PASSAGES © ; : : : : : : : 5340 
INDEX OF AUTHORS : : ς : ;: ; : : τ 3 55 


INDEX OF SUBJECTS : : : ἢ Σ : : . . 360 


Gra lah ΚΕ 


yg THE FALL-STORY AND ITS EXEGESIS. 


Introductory. 


THE starting-point for the historian of the Christian 
doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin is undoubtedly the 
narrative contained in the third chapter of the Book of 
Genesis. S. Paul’s teaching as to the connexion of human 
sin and death with Adam’s transgression is but one of the 
various possible interpretations of this narrative, slowly and 
tentatively reached after some centuries of Jewish exegesis 
and reflection. S. Augustine’s fuller and more definite doc- 
trine is but a developed form of one of the possible interpre- 
tations of the statements of S. Paul, arrived at after the 
preparation of further centuries of Christian speculation. The 
record which both the Apostle and the great Father of the 
West treated as essentially an account of historical fact was 
for each the ultimate source and foundation of his views with 
regard to the origin and universality of human sinfulness. 

But this Old Testament story implies a previous course of 
development in theological thought much greater in duration 
than that by which were subsequently reached, from the 
biblical narrative as starting-point, the most complex post- 
Reformation theories of unfallen and fallen human nature. 
It can no longer be assumed, in the light of knowledge yielded 
by comparative mythology and the prehistoric sciences, that 
the third chapter of Genesis supplies us with the record of a 
revelation of historical fact, divinely given at some definite 
time, or even with a story whose form and details were wholly 
the creation of its writer’s inspired imagination. It is a 


abe I 


to 


The Fatt-story [ CHAP. 


record which presents a complicated past history for our 
investigation. The theologian, then, who would completely 
trace the history of the doctrine of the Fall, though using the 
early chapters of Genesis as the fixed point whence to set out, 
must work backwards from their narrative itself to its mytho- 
logical sources, and even, as far as possible, to the psychological 
conditions for the origin of these sources, as well as forwards 
to the developments and refinements familiar to students of 
the doctrine as it was expounded by scholastic theology in 
the period of its most highly perfected elaboration. Ands 
indeed it is only thus that he can estimate, from a purely.” 
theological standpoint, the validity of the claim which is still 
commonly made on behalf of this narrative: the claim that, 
whatever view be taken of its literary nature, it embodies a 
revelation of actual historical fact which forms the basis of 
the Christian doctrines of Sin and Redemption. 

It is intended, therefore, in the present study of the 
development of the theory of the origin of human sinfulness 
involved in the ecclesiastical doctrines of the Fall and of 
Original Sin, to discuss somewhat fully the scriptural narra- 
tive from which those doctrines have been derived. It will 

- be important to ascertain, in so far as it is possible, the mean- 
ing which this narrative had for the age in which it received 
its present form. This can of course only be done by divesting 
ourselves of all ideas which familiar later developments of 
thought cause us, perhaps, habitually to read into it; and by 
translating ourselves, as completely as may be, to the mental 
standpoint of its writer. And for guidance towards this end 
it will be necessary to make use of two lines of research. In 
the first place, it will be essential to recapitulate some of the 
results which can be said to have been reached, with any 
high degree of probability, concerning the date and nature of 
the writing in which the story of the first transgression is 
contained. Only thus can we attempt to recover its historical 
background. In the second place, it will be desirable to sift 
the material yielded by investigations in the fields of compara- 
tive religion and race-psychology for any such facts or general 
principles as may throw light upon the sources and previous 
history of the elements of which it is composed. The former 


1] and its E-xegests 3 


of these iines of inquiry, together with the exegesis of the 
narrative as a whole, and its literary criticism, will occupy the 
present chapter. 


The Jahvist Document. 


The Paradise-story belongs to that stratum of the hexa- 
-teuch called the Jahvist or, less happily, the Prophetic docu- 
ment (J). This is believed to draw from more ancient sources 
than the Elohist document (FE), with which it came to be 
blended. The time at which the Jahvist history was written, 
and the length of the period occupied by the process of 
committing its material to writing, have not been ascertained 
with exactness; they are still matters of speculation. Indeed 
the data for an accurate determination of its age, as a writing, 
do not at present exist ; there is a complete want of external 
evidence. Various dates between the limits goo—700 B.C, 
have been assigned to it, and the mean between these two 
extremes would perhaps be provisionally adopted by the 
majority of scholars. More definite statements on the matter, 
however, in the present condition of knowledge, are unsafe. 
It is therefore impossible to decide whether the history in 
which the account of the loss of Paradise is contained was 
first reduced to writing in the age of the earlier literary 
prophets or in pre-prophetic times. Inasmuch as it is pre- 
carious to ignore the possibility of the coexistence of widely 
different mental temperaments and theological standpoints at 
a time of active progress in religious thought; since we are 
ignorant as to how far the archaic characters of the stories 
contained in J are due to the fixation of their verbal form in 
oral transmission, and how far their editor or editors were 
content to be the servants rather than the masters of their 
material, which, though merely folk-lore, was doubtless very 
venerable in their eyes}, it is not absolutely safe to infer that 


1 Several questions dealt with in this discussion of the Fall-story are compli- 
cated by our inability always to feel sure exactly how much of what is written 
represents the real standpoint of the Jahvist compiler, and how much is tradition 
of hoary antiquity whose perpetuation he desired or tolerated. There can be 
little doubt that the two motives, of preserving venerable traditions and of adapting 
them to be the vehicle for the highest Hebrew religion of his time, both strongly 
influenced the writer. 


τ 


4 The Falt-story | CHAP.” 


the Jahvist history, as a written document, was of necessity 
chronologically earlier than the period of the prophets. On 
the other hand there are no proofs of the influence of the 
writing prophets upon J sufficient to compel us to believe that 
that document could not have existed before the time of 
Amos or Hosea. On the contrary, it is not difficult to gauge 
the difference between the Jahvist source and the earliest 
prophetic books as to position on the scale of advancement in 
ethical, religious and theological reflection. Measured by 
such a standard, the Jahvist writing would seem to be 
decidedly the more primitive. 

We may notice first, in illustration of this assertion, the 
crude naiveté of J’s delineation of Jahveh. Jahveh is repre- 
sented as possessing many purely human characteristics. 
He walks in the garden to enjoy the cool of the evening; He 
makes clothes for Adam and Eve; He smells the savour of 
Noah’s sacrifice. He is wiser than men, but His knowledge 
is limited: He needs to come down to see the tower of Babel, 
and to ascertain by His own investigation whether the wicked- 
ness of Sodom is as great as He has heard. Jahveh is as- 
signed many ethical attributes ; but His character is not as 
yet very perfectly moralised. He apparently misrepresents 
to Adam and Eve the consequences that would follow from 
partaking of the tree of knowledge: He is jealous of man’s 
encroachment on His prerogatives of knowledge and immor- 
tality. Jahveh is pourtrayed, in fact, in somewhat crudely 
anthropomorphic manner. And this anthropomorphism is 
altogether different from that, for example, of Amos, which 
is a necessary expedient for the description of God as a 
personal Being; that of the Jahvist narrative is the expression 
rather of a definite stage of theological thought, beyond which 
the prophets had advanced. Again, we fail to .find in the 
Jahvist source any disapproval of reverence for ‘holy places,’ 
for sacred trees and wells, and similar survivals of Israel’s 
earlier Nature-worship, such as would be vehemently de- 
nounced, as if heathenish and unspiritual, by the prophets. 
To them, much that the narratives of J contain must have 
been somewhat repulsive. These narratives evince a sim- 
plicity in the toleration of ancient morality and religion such 


1]. and tts Exegesis 5 


as would have been impossible had they been the literary 
creation of writers thoroughly imbued with the severely 
ethical and polemically monotheistic ideas which characterise 
the message of the prophets. Thus the Jahvist history would 
seem to be approaching, rather than to have attained, the 
prophetic standpoint. It exhibits, however, much of the 
moral earnestness of prophecy, as may be seen from its 
treatment of sin. In the story with which we are especially 
concerned, for instance, the standpoint of earliest Hebrew 
moral thought, according to which sin is the breach of human 
custom, or an involuntary wrong, is left far behind’. Sin, in 
the Paradise-story, is a matter of what we should call the 
will and the conscience in relation to God, a deliberate trans- 
gcression of a divine command: and this is the view of the 
prophets. But there is no reason to assume that we have 
here an instance of prophetic influence; rather must we 
postulate that the lofty ideas of the prophets had been 
developing in the minds of individuals who preceded them. 
It is also to be observed that the borrowed traditions in- 
corporated into this source are very largely purified from 
mythological elements. Such foreign stories are modified in 
ethos and adapted to the purpose of the writer's theology. 
This self-purification of Hebrew religion had doubtless 
been in process, however, long before the period of the 
prophets. 

Thus, if it is impossible to carry back, with safety, the 
writing of the Jahvist document to a time at all distantly 
pre-prophetic, it is extremely probable, for the reasons which 
have just been given, that the narratives contained in it are of 
much greater antiquity than the document itself, and that 
they are witnesses to the religious thought of Israel long 
before the times in which the literary prophets lived. We 
shall probably not be far wrong if we refer the present literary 
form of J to a writer who lived somewhere near the threshold 
of the prophetic age; and if, in our exegesis of it, we en- 
deavour to interpret it from the mental standpoint of that 


1 See W. R. Smith, 7he Prophets of Israel, 1895, pp. 102 ff.; Clemen, Lehre 
von der Siinde, 1 Theil, S. 213; Schultz, O. 7. Theology, E.T. 


6 The Faltl-story [ CHAP. 


time, in so far as that standpoint is capable of being re- 
covered}. 

It may be added that the Jahvist record is in all probability 
to be regarded, so far as it is a collection of elements of folk- 
lore and history, as the product of a school of writers. For 
there are overwhelmingly strong reasons, from the point of 
view of literary criticism, for believing it to be ultimately of 
composite authorship, and for regarding it as capable of differ- 
entiation into further elements. 

Adopting the suggestion of Wellhausen, Budde was the 
first to point out the existence of different sources in J ; 
and he has been followed, in so far as his main results are 
concerned, by most other critics. But in spite of being 
thus incompletely homogeneous in structure, the Jahvist 
document, when considered in relation even to the Elohistic 
writing, has generally been held to be a unity distinguished 
for the most part by a characteristic style and other traits. 
Its literary style is simple, incisive and vivid; and the artistic 
merit of some of its stories, which present a highly finished 
picture by means of a few entirely concrete touches, is of 
the highest order. The account of the temptation and trans- 
gression in Eden is often said, from this point of view, to be 
a pearl of Hebrew literature. 

The conciseness and skilful construction of some of these 
stories has suggested to several of the ablest scholars that 
they owe the form in which they appear in our written 
records to gradual perfection whilst being orally transmitted. 
In this case, the literary criticism which has emphasised minute 
differences of style between the various strata of the hexateuch, 
and has attempted “to get some coherent conception of the 
authors from their works?,’ has overreached itself. And 
indeed the reaction against such criticism has already set 
in. In Prof. Gunkel’s recent commentary on Genesis’, which 

1 J’s deep knowledge of human nature and its moral capacities, his extensive 
ethnological information, and other qualities, point towards a date bordering on 


that of the earlier prophets. See M¢Curdy, Hzstory, Prophecy and the Monuments, 
vol. 111. chap. iii. 


2 Critical Review, X11. i. p. 5. 
3 A work to which, perhaps, even before this point, indebtedness should have 
been acknowledged. 


| and its Exegesis 7 


represents the tendency of methods of research which will 
probably be further used in the immediate future, the symbols 
fepbeet  ὙΓΕ indeed mre railed, wouts theyvecease to represent 
individual writers or composers: they stand rather for collec- 
tions of oral tradition, for the work of guilds rather than 
of single persons. But reactions proverbially go to extremes ; 
and however large may have been the part played by oral 
reciters of the sagas of Genesis in. giving them dramatic 
form, and however great the reverence of collectors for the 
venerable material which tradition yielded, there are obvious 
proofs that those who finally embodied it in the written record 
which we inherit dealt freely with it in respect of expurgation 
and adaptation to a moral and religious purpose, and therefore 
stamped upon it the impress of their respective individualities. 
Moreover some at least of the stories of J, besides sharing in 
common the marks of a single purpose and the traits of one 
and the same literary style, suggest the master hand of 
uncommon genius; they reveal an art which cannot safely 
be ascribed to successive casual improvements of a floating 
popular poem, but which receives a more natural explanation 
in the view which sober criticism has long scientifically up- 
held: the view, namely, that the final /¢erary form of these 
stories is due in the main to the artistic genius of a moulder 
of tradition’. 

The existence in oral tradition of the narratives which are 
woven, in the Jahvist document, into a continuous history, 
will call for notice at a later page. Meanwhile, it is hoped that 
the foregoing account of the writing in which the Fall-story 
is enshrined, brief as it has of necessity been, may suffice to 
show that, when the materials of this story were taking their 
present form, Hebrew religion was of a comparatively primitive 
kind, and Hebrew theology, as distinguished from the mytho- 
logy which preceded it, was in a scarcely more than nascent 
state. [hese considerations should make us cautious lest we 
attribute to the narrative, didactic though it was intended to 
be, a doctrinal significance deeper than its writer knew, and 

1 There are now and again verbal coincidences between the several narratives 


of J which would seem to be best explained by this theory. Cf. e.g. Gen. ili. 16 
and iv. 7; ill. 17 and iv. 11; iii. 9 and iv. 0. 


8 The Faltt-story [ CHAP. 


ignore the possibility that much of the rich theological 
suggestiveness which it bears for us was undesigned. To 
its marvellous artistic merit, and to its having been taken, 
rightly or wrongly, to treat, with all its characteristic vigour, 
of a deep problem in which mankind have for ages been 
profoundly interested, must largely be attributed, no doubt, 
the influence, exceptional not only for Old Testament lore 
but for literature in general, which it has exerted upon the 
thought of so many centuries, and the fact that so many 
generations, and indeed so many great philosophers, have 
read in it their own reflections and ideas! 


Exegesis of the narrative of Gen. 777. 


Regarding the Paradise-story as a single connected narra- 
tive embodying one or several particular didactic purposes, 
and postponing for the present the questions of its composite 
nature and of the past history of the materials of which it is 
composed, we may now proceed to the exegesis of the story 
as it stands. We have to endeavour, that is, to ascertain 
what was the meaning which its /zterary author, the individual 
who gave to it its present written form, intended to convey 
to contemporaries of the early prophetic or the pre-pro- 
phetic period. It is from the standpoint of that age, in 
so far as we can recover it, that the Jahvist narrative must 
be read. Consequently it is necessary for the present to 
ignore the lingering reminiscences of still earlier meaning 
and association which portions of the passage undoubtedly 

1 e.g. Kant, Herder, Hegel, Schiller. 

For a full treatment of the questions discussed above, for authority for the 
statements made, and for many of the inferences drawn from them, the student is 
referred to the following works: Carpenter and Harford-Battersby, 7he Hexateuch, 
vol. 1. 1900; Addis, Documents of the Hexateuch; Spurrell, Motes on the text 
of Genests, 2nd ed.; Holzinger, Linlectung in den Hexateuch, and Genesis ; 
Montefiore, Avbdert Lectures, 1892; Gunkel, Genesis; W. R. Smith, Religion 
of the Semites and Prophets of Israel; Budde, Ur-geschichte; Kittel, Azstory of the 
Flebrews, E.T.; Worcester, Zhe Book of Genests 1n the light of modern knowledge ; 
Arts. Genesis, Hexateuch, etc., in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible and Encyclo- 
paedia Biblica. Opposed views may be found in Green, Uvzity of Genests. For 
an attempt to reproduce the idiom and style of Gen. iii. by literal translation, see 


Duff, O. Test. Theology, vol. 11. The translations of Lenormant into French, and 
of Kautzsch into German, may be found useful. 


1 and tts Exegesis 9 


contain, and to concentrate attention solely upon the implica- 
tions which its compiler himself intended to convey ; and it is 
equally essential to avoid the opposite extreme of unhistorical 
interpretation already mentioned, the natural tendency to 
find in the story the reflections of far later ages. It will be 
desirable therefore, at the outset, to lay aside any ready-made 
views or doctrines which we have been wont to associate with its 
contents, and which inevitably transmit their colour to its state- 
ments; remembering that what New Testament or patristic 
writers understood from it only enables us to estimate what it 
meant to them, not what it implied to its compiler or to the 
generation to which it was addressed. 

Of these two errors, the former has frequently been com- 
mitted by students of folk-lore and comparative mythology, — 
who, disregarding the facts supplied by history and literary 
criticism, have discussed the Fall-story as if it were on a level 
with the crudest of heathen mythology or symbolism, and 
have regarded it as intended to convey a meaning which could 
only have been associated at all with the much more primitive 
ideas whence possibly the imagery of the story was at first 
derived, but which only survive in the existing narrative as 
lingering echoes; ideas which, in their entirety and _ their 
original significance, were incapable of being inculcated in 
the work of a writer belonging to such a period as we assign 
to the Jahvist document. It is the opposite anachronism to 
this, however, which calls for more emphatic notice here; 
for it is this which vitiates the traditional exegesis of the 
third chapter of Genesis. This exegesis is less an exposition 
of the real meaning of the narrative than an imposition upon 
it of subsequently developed teaching. According to the 
interpretation which hitherto has generally been adopted, the 
story is primarily an account of a fall of the human race in 
its first parents; it is not merely an account of the historical 
entrance of sin into the world but also an explanation of the 
origin and universality of sinfulness throughout mankind. 

There is no hint, however, in the passage itself, of Adam’s 
moral condition being fundamentally altered by his act of 
disobedience. The only allusion to the original estate of our 
first parents, attributing to them absence of shame at the 


10 Lhe Faltt-story [ CHAP. 


fact that they were naked, of itself implies no more than that 
they shared the ignorance of childhood, or that they did not 
possess even the most elementary characteristics of civilisa- 
tion. Indeed, in the following chapter the same history 
describes the beginnings of the rudest arts. The narrative, 
too, connects the awakening of shame not with sense of guilt, 
but with acquisition of knowledge due to the mavical virtues 
of the tree. And the changes brought about through the 
punishment of the transgression are physical: the ills of 
human life. There is no implication that Adam originally 
differed from any other man as regards capacity for integrity’ 
or for intercourse with God, or that his ‘nature’ was perverted 
by his act of disobedience. The idea that his sin was the 
source of the sinfulness of succeeding generations, or in any 
way an explanation of it, is altogether absent from the 
narrative; and, so far as’ we can gather from the Old 
Testament, it was foreign to the thought of the prophetic, 
not to speak of the pre-prophetic, age. For though the 
Jahvist source undoubtedly emphasises the seriousness and 
the general diffusion of sin’, it yet has no adequate sense 
of the absolute universality of sin, such as was attained in 
later ages”. Nor is there room for the inference that it 
assigns to Adam’s fall any deteriorating influence upon the 
free self-determination of his posterity. Cain’s sin is by no 
means thus explained ; but the whole of his guilt and respon- 
sibility is thrown upon the sinner himself. Sin is personified 
and compared to a ravenous beast lurking for its prey; 
but Cain is told that ‘he ought to rule over it®’ If sinfulness 


1 Gen. iv., vi. 5—8, 12, viii. 21, ix. 20—27, xi. I—9. 

* Gen. vi. 5 ff., £2, viii. 21 speak of sin as being universally spread, but only 
at a particular time. Abel is regarded as well-pleasing to God, and Noah as 
righteous before Him; therefore the representation of ‘all flesh’ as having 
‘corrupted its way,’ and of man as such that ‘every imagination of the thoughts 
of his heart was only evil continually,’ cannot, without inconsistency, be inter- 
preted as if it were an absolute statement about all mankind from the beginning 
onwards. 

* Gen. iv. 7 (R.V. margin). This translation makes much better sense than 
that adopted in the text, and embodies what was apparently the recognised inter- 
pretation of the synagogue (Siphre 82b; Jerus. Targum). The Targum of 
Onkelos misses the meaning here. See, on this passage, Loisy, Revue d’Aistoire et 
de littérature relig., 1. 335 ff.; Spurrell, Mores on the Heb. Text of Genesis. Sin is 


1] and its Exegesis Il 


is traced to an ‘evil imagination, it is not ascribed to what 
we call the evil ‘nature, of the individual heart. We are here 
very far even from the Jewish doctrine of the yezer hara. 
Finally, if the Jahvist compiler has intended, in his account 
of the beginnings of human history, to sketch the develop- 
ment of sin in the world, which may well be the case, it must 
be observed that the first transgression is not only not treated 
as different in import from others, as if it were the most 
momentous catastrophe, but simply as the first of a series 
whose members are arranged in ascending order of magnitude: 
the disobedience of the first parents, the fratricide of their 
son, the increased bloodthirstiness of Lamech, the general 
corruption calling for the deluge’. 

It is to be concluded then, from exegetical grounds alone, 
that the history contained in Gen. iii. was not intended by its WA 
ultimate compiler to supply an explanation of the cause oft 
universal sinfulness. The most that it offers is an account of 
Sin’s actual beginning. Mankind’s capacity for sin from the 
first is assumed. Later Hebrew literature, as will be seen, 
supports this conclusion by strongly suggesting that, at the 
period in which J was produced, the time was not ripe for 
such advanced reflection. The Jahvist writer must be said 
to have had no doctrine of a fall of the race in Adam as the 
cause of the moral evil of Adam’s posterity. . 

It is indeed open to question whether the narrative under 
consideration was intended primarily as a description of the 
entrance of sin into the world, rather than as an explanation 
of the ills of life, which are here, as in many ancient legends, 
associated with the striving after knowledge and civilisation. 
Perhaps, after all, its chief moral is that human evils are the 
consequence of sin? Man’s hard lot is indeed traced to sez ; 


personified and viewed as masc., according to this interpretation. . The Heb., 
however, leaves the R.V. (text) rendering possible. 

1 The general depravity which brought upon the race the visitation of the 
deluge is expressly assigned by J to another cause (Gen. vi. 1—4, probably a 
more original Hebrew account of the entrance of sin into the world; see below, 
chs. viii., x.) Increased sinfulness is associated with increased scope for indulgence 
of passion consequent upon increased progress in the arts. 

2 Rothe regarded it as an account of the origin of death rather than of sin. 
See Dorner, System of Christ. doctrine, E.T., Ul. p. 13, n. 5. For other views 
see Clemen, Lehre von der Siinde, S. 151 ff. 


12 Lhe fall-story [ CHAP. 


Adam and Eve consciously transgress a divine command, 
and Eve admits that she has been ‘beguiled.’ 

But though the story thus assumes the character of a 
history of the first sin, it may be doubted whether it does so 
in a manner other than secondary and, to some extent, 
incidental. The writer has certainly imparted a moral tone 
to his material which it possibly altogether lacked in an 
earlier state; yet, if we are to judge from the structure of 
his skilfully told drama, his interest centres rather on the 
physical evils of life than on the moral cause to which they 
are attributed. It is the introduction of these ills that forms 
the climax to which his account of the transgression leads. 
This point is, however, very difficult to decide. For the 
story is really complex, and deals simultaneously with several 
questions which seem to have perplexed primitive thought ; 
and no help towards a decision is supplied by the surrounding 
context, which deals with several aspects of human develop- 
ment. But it is much less to the point to answer this 
question than to raise it; the only useful purpose served in 
either case being a protest against the hasty assumption that 
the passage should be regarded exclusively, or even pre- 
eminently, as a Fall-story. There would seem to be much 
reason for associating it with the class of stories called — 
cuiture-legends, and for considering it as part of a history of 
the growth of civilisation regarded on its religious side. And 
this brings us to the question: what was the nature of the act 
in which the transgression consisted ?—a question which in 
turn depends on the interpretation to be given to ‘the tree of 

\ the knowledge of good and evil.’ 
Wellhausen* made a new departure in the exegesis of 
Gen. iii. when he repudiated the view that the eating of the 
/ forbidden tree of knowledge was intended to represent the 
means by which man acquired moral determination, the 
awakening of conscience, or the knowledge of the difference 
between virtue and sin. The knowledge which the narrator 
understands Adam and Eve to have thus obtained, and for 


1 Prolegomena, 2* Ausg., 1. S. 315 ff. Clemen thinks that Wellhausen here 
unconsciously follows von Hofmann, and refers to that writer’s Schriftbewets, 
a Ase yo 278 tis - 


"ἢ and tts Exegesis 13 


the acquisition of which they were punished, Wellhausen 
urges, could not possibly be moral knowledge. The possession 
of this is already presupposed in that the narrative represents 
the man and woman as understanding beforehand the 
difference between obedience and disobedience; and God 
could hardly be regarded by the writer as wishing to with- 
hold knowledge of this kind from man. It is, on the 
contrary, general knowledge, or cleverness, which is here” 
prohibited, and which man is represented as anxious to possess 
knowledge which, in the highest sense, belongs only to Go 
and in appropriating which man 15 regarded as exceeding the- 
limits of his nature, as encroaching upon divine prerogatives, 
and as making himself independent of and equal to God. It 
is the knowledge of the secrets of the world, the knowledge 
which is power, and which, at the same time, involves a break 
with the state of nature. Wellhausen also seeks to justify 
this conclusion by pointing out that the primary sense of the 
Hebrew words for ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is ‘beneficial’ and 
‘hurtful’ ; and it is in this sense that he considers them to be 
used in the present passage. 

In criticising this treatment of the story of the loss of 
Paradise, Budde! attempted to evade the difficulty that, if 
the tree was the means by which man’s moral judgment or 
self-determination was to be acquired, God must be here 
represented as unwilling for man to rise above the non-moral 
level of the brutes. This writer maintains that the name 
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil signifies that 
man was destined in any case to learn by it what was morally 
good and evil; for, whether he obeyed or transgressed the 
command concerning it, he would equally attain to such 
knowledge, and in the former case would have done so 
without violating the will of God. Dillmann would similarly 
explain the meaning of the tree of knowledge. Smend, 
however, has shown that there are insuperable objections 
against such an interpretation®, As he points out, Adam and 


1 Uregeschichte, S. 65 ff. 2 Genesis, 6% Aufl., S. 46. 

3 4lt-Test. Religionsgeschichte, 1893, S. 120. The few pages to be found 
here on the contents of Gen. ii., iii., form a valuable piece of literature on the 
subject. 


14 Lhe Fall-story [ CHAP. 


Eve are represented as being expelled from Eden not because 
they had wrongly acquired the knowledge of good and evil, 
but because they had come to possess it at all. This know- 
ledge has made them so dangerous to Jahveh, Who says ‘the 
man is become as one of us,’ that if they now obtained the 
further divine prerogative of immortality His unique majesty 
and superiority would be threatened. Therefore are they 
driven out of Paradise and deprived of access to the tree of 
‘fe. The knowledge imparted by the tree, then, could 
carcely be the discernment of moral good and evil; this 
could not make its human possessor a dangerous rival to the 
Deity. The knowledge, moreover, was forbidden absolutely ; 
and analogy with the tree of life requires that it could only 
be acquired by the actual eating of the forbidden fruit, not at 
all by the moral discipline involved in resisting the temptation 
to partake of it. We do not hesitate to conclude, therefore, 
that the knowledge of good and evil spoken of in this 
narrative is, as Wellhausen maintained, the knowledge which 
makes man more or less the lord of Nature, the wisdom 
which can turn natural forces to human use% -Thus the 
Paradise-story attempts to connect the painful elements 
of human life with the thirst for progress in knowledge and 
culture, and at the same time, in harmony with nascent 
Hebrew ethical religion, identifies the transition from igno- 
rance to intelligence, just because it, in turn, has been 
‘connected with the introduction of physical evils, with a 
transition from innocence to guilt. That this reading of the 
narrative involves the representation of Jahveh as hostile 
to man’s intellectual development is no difficulty. Such an 
idea is in keeping with the rudimentary theology of the age 
to which, in its earlier, oral,.forms, at least, the narrative 
belongs. For Jahveh is not, for ancient Hebrew writers, 


1 With this agrees the earliest known Jewish interpretation of the tree and its 
action, in the Book of Enoch, xxxii. 3. See below, ch. viii. 

2 Gunkel, in his recent commentary on Genesis, takes the transgression to be 
the half conscious sin of children, and the transition which resulted to be that from 
the ignorance of childhood to the rationality of maturer age. This would seem to 
be a distinct retrogression from the illuminating and consistent interpretation of 
Wellhausen, Smend and others, which one is glad to find to be also adopted in 
at least one Art. (Avow/edge) in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible. 


Ἢ and its Exegesis 15 


so far exalted above man as to be omniscient in the sense 
of knowing without the need of learning’, or to be superior 
to the necessity of safeguarding His supremacy against 
numbers’, or strength and longevity’, as well as against the 
knowledge which is especially said to confer on man ‘likeness 
to God*.’ The original meaning of the story, or of one 
strand of its intertwined component elements, undoubtedly 
reveals itself in the verse® which assigns dread, within the 
divine circle, of man’s becoming a rival power as the reason 
for the expulsion from Paradise, and therefore for the 
prohibition of the tree of knowledge. 

The narrator evidently assumes without question the 
justice of the divine resentment; he acquiesces in the punish- 
ment of the sinners, and attributes to Adam and Eve the 
same culpable intention as that of the builders of the tower 
of Babel. Their act bespoke a wrong independence of God, 
Who had. prepared the world and Paradise especially for 
man, and Who would. have continued to insure man’s 
happiness had he not overstepped the limits within which, 
according to the thought of a remote age, mankind's 
development was conceived as intended to proceed. It 15 
difficult, however, on account of the surviving traces of more 
primitive thought’, to catch here with certainty the note of 
one who writes or compiles, as it would seem, from the verge 
of the prophetic point of view. But the idea of Jahveh’s / 
strong resentment of any form of human exaltation against 
Himself, or of encroachment upon His divine prerogatives, is 
conspicuous in many Old Testament writings, according to 
which pride and self-reliant defiance constitute the essence of / 
sin’. If Jahveh’s resentment of man’s progress in knowledge 


'Ct, above, p- 4- 2 Gen. xi. 6—8. 

3 bid. vi. 3. R.V. margin. OS [tats 5, 22: 

5 Jéid. ili. 22, a verse which escaped editorial purgation of its polytheistic 
implications. 

δ. Thus in iii. 22, Jahveh admits that the serpent’s assertion as to the virtues of 
the tree was true and no lie; and His own threat as to the consequence of eating, 
on the other hand, was not fulfilled. Did an older version directly impute a 
benevolent deception to Jahveh? See also below, p. 72 f. 

τ Cf. the incidents of Israel’s asking for a king, 1 Sam. viii. 6, and David’s 
numbering of the people, 2 Sam. xxiv.; and see, in the prophetic books, Hos. viii. 


τό The ξαΐϊ- ον [ CHAP. 


seems to us an impossible thought to attribute to the writer 
of Genesis iii, we must bear in mind, in addition to the 
crudity of his theology, and the existence, elsewhere in the 
Old Testament,-of ideas which present some approach to that 
which we are inclined to think objectionable, the fact that the 
writer was probably almost as much the servant as the 
master of the substance of his venerable traditions. More- 
over, it has seemed to some authorities that what he thus 
derived, to some extent, ultimately from foreign sources in 
order to furnish a ‘history of origins, he hardly assimilated, 
in all respects, to his own thought’. 


Literary Criticism of the Fall-story. 


It has already been stated that, in the opinion of some of 
the best critics, the Jahvist document is composite in literary 


2, 4; ΧΙ 13, ΧΙ Oy ΤΙΣ 1SAl, 1), 152: lil. I—4, X. 19 ΠῚ ΣΙ ΤΣ ΣΣΠ ἢ τ᾿ 
XXXVil. 243; also (later) Ezek. xxvili. The idea that there are secret things that 
God alone possesses the right to know, appears in Deut. xxix. 29. That wisdom 
is ‘hid from the eyes of all living,’ is taught in Job xxviii. 21. The conception of 
lofty things being in antagonism to God occurs also in Job xxi. 22, xxxvill. 15; 
Isai. x. 33 (see Toy, Crit. Commentary on Proverbs, p. 128). Hebrew thought 
on this point had therefore at least some resemblance to that of the Greeks em- 
bodied in the Prometheus legend. It may be added that the folk-lore of a much 
later age attributed man’s knowledge of various arts and sciences to devilish 
agencies, as is evident from the groundwork of the Book of Enoch (see below, 
chap. viil.). 

1 Smend, of. cit., S. 121-2, observes that the pessimistic tone of the conclusion 
of Gen. 111., and the deep rupture which it describes as existing betwixt God and 
man, is forgotten when the writer passes on to the history of the patriarchal time. 
Gunkel (of. cit., S. 29), however, demurs to the inference that the pessimistic 
view may not have been equally characteristic of Hebrew thought. 

Though the primitive myths which underlie the Paradise-story were doubtless 
largely foreign in origin, we need not have recourse to the supposition of incom- 
plete assimilation or ‘ Hebraisation’ in order to explain the apparent inconsistency, 
just alluded to, in its portraiture of Jahveh. It is true that Jahveh is now conceived 
in it as an Elohim-Being who resents human knowledge of certain things as an 
encroachment on the divine sphere, and now as the beneficent Power who pre- 
pared the world for man, and created him to enjoy an easy and pleasant life in 
the divine garden. We have, in this portraiture, elements in common with the 
characters of both the Kronos and the Zeus of Hesiod. But, as pointed out above, 
there is something remotely resembling envy clinging to the character of Jahveh 
in O. T. writings later than J. This fact is sufficient to explain the implications 
of Gen. iii., and to show that there is foundation in early Hebrew thought for both 
the qualities of character there attributed to Jahveh. 


1| and its Exegesis 17 


structure. Indeed in its story of Paradise and the temptation 
there appear signs of compilation from more than one written 
source, or of editorial interpolations. Inasmuch as the nearly 
contemporary Elohist document refers by name to previously 
existing books}, it is @ priort probable that earlier cwritings 
were also used in the compilation of J. A close study of the 
document, and indeed of that portion of it with which we are 
especially concerned, goes far to prove this supposition 
inductively. It will be unnecessary to enter here with any 
degree of fulness into the literary-critical problems which the 
Jahvist narrative of Gen. ii—iii. presents’, It will be 
sufficient to mention such provisional results of the close 
scrutiny to which the record has been subjected as are 
probable in themselves and relevant to the purpose in hand, 
passing by the more elaborate attempts to assign minute 
shreds of the dissected narrative to particular sources and, 
above all, conjecturally to rewrite the text, as somewhat 
arbitrary, and decidedly less trustworthy than ingenious and 
bold. | 

The first nineteen verses of Chap. iil. are admitted with 
almost complete unanimity to be a practically homogeneous 
literary composition. The account which they present of the 
temptation, sin and punishment of Adam and Eve is a self- 
consistent whole: a story methodically and skilfully told 
with hardly a superfluous word: the outcome of creative or 
adaptative reflection upon traditional material, and very 
possibly welded, to some extent, into its present form during 
the process of oral transmission. The 20th verse, however, 
which offers somewhat irrelevantly and abruptly an etymo- 
logical explanation of the name Eve (//avva), such as would 
be more in place in Chap. iv., is generally suspected of being 


1 The Book of the Wars of Jahveh (Num. xxi. τα, but this passage is obscure, 
see Academy, Oct. 22, 1892), and the Book of Jasher (or the Upright) (Josh. 
x. 13, 2 Sam. i. 18). These books are likely to date from about David's reign. 

2 For a fuller treatment see Budde, Urgeschichte; Holzinger, Zinleitung in 
den Hexateuch, and Genesis; Gunkel, Genests (Nowack’s Hand-Kommentar sum 
A.T., 1901); Schrader, Studien sur Kritik u. Erklarung der bil. Urgeschichte, 
S. 119 ff. (which maintains the unity of authorship of the history of chaps. ii. 
and iii.); Carpenter and Harford-Battersby, exaeuch, vols. 1. and 11. (212 doc.). 


Ts 2 


18 Lhe falt-story [ CHAP. 


an addition from a different source, or a redactor’s inter- 
polation. There is also considerable doubt as to whether the 
last three verses of Chap. iii. do not contain fragments 
detached from at least one other source than that which 
supplies the main portion of the narrative’. Budde, followed 
by Holzinger, Stade, Gunkel and many others, regards the 
passages mentioning a tree of life as interpolations foreign to 
the main thread of the story, which only refers (iii. 3) to one 
tree ‘in the midst of the garden.’ Again, the expulsion 
from Eden seems, in vv. 23 and 24, to be narrated twice ; and 
a similar reduplication has been thought to exist in the 
description of the planting of Eden in Chap. ii, implying the 
use of varying traditions. Finally, the verses in that chapter 
(10—14) which describe the four rivers of Paradise have 
generally been regarded as an addition of later date®. 


1 Gunkel (Geveszs, S. 23) makes suggestive but venturesome conjectures with 
regard to some of these supposed fragments. The source which yields ii. 8, 9, and 
perhaps iii. 21, 22, and the allusion in iii. 24 to the ‘flame of a sword,’ would 
appear to him to be more mythological than that from which the main part of the 
story is drawn. This writer’s division of J into sub-sources differs from that 
of Budde. 

2 For his reasons, some of which are strong, see Uvgeschichte, S. 46 ff., or 
Holzinger, Geneszs, S. 26 and 41. Inasmuch as in both Chaps. ii. and iii. one tree 
only is forbidden, though from iii. 22 the tree of life ought equally to be prohibited, 
because, once tasted, it would have conferred immortality and made man, in that 
sense, ‘equal to God,’ it seems possible that the tree of life was inserted in ch. ii. 
(the construction of ii. 9 ὁ is awkward and remarkable ; see Kautzsch and Socin, 
Genesis, and on the opposite side Driver, Hedraica, 1885, p. 33) to prepare the 
way for iii. 22, which is possibly derived from a different written source than that 
which supplies ili. r—19. It is sometimes held, on the other hand (see Addis, 
op. cit., in loc.; Worcester, op. czt.; Kuenen, Theol. Tijdschrift, xviii. 136; 
Cheyne, Eucycl. Bibl., Art. Paradise), that the passages which mention the tree 
of life represent an older version; that the tree of knowledge, said to be more 
distinctly Hebrew, replaced it in the later source used by the writer of ch. iii. and 
that its name was interpolated in ch. ii. Cf. also Loisy, Revue a’htstoire et de 
littérature religteuses, 1. 225 ff. 

3 It will be obvious that the arguments for the existence in this narrative of 
fragments of at least one more written source than the principal are based not 
upon alleged differences of style, but upon apparent repetitions, discontinuities, 
and even discrepancies. It would be difficult, ¢.g., to believe that the three 
various statements as to the position of Eden relatively to the writer’s home, in 
ii. 8, r1—14 and 11]. 24, could have been originally penned by the same hand. 

It may be mentioned here that Budde, of. czt., S. 83, and Robertson Smith 
(Religion of the Semites, 1894, p. 307, n. 2) regard the words in ii. 15, ‘to dress it 
and to keep it,’ as a later addition inconsistent with the punishment mentioned 
in ill. 17—19. Possibly the whole verse should be assigned to the same source 
as that from which the four preceding verses are taken. Gunkel (Gez., 2 loc.) 


1] and its Exegesis 19g 


We may provisionally accept these results of criticism 
without admitting that they are all so indisputably grounded 
as to compel conviction. It can indeed hardly be doubted 
that they contain some truth. In that case we have evidence 
of the existence, probable enough in itself, of several varying 
written forms of the Paradise-story, from which the complete 
Jahvist account was ultimately compiled. 

It is probable that the writing of continuous national 
history began, with the Hebrews, about the time of David or 
Solomon}, perhaps a century or so before the compilation of 
the Jahvist document. During this interval there was scope 
for numerous recensions of the first written collections of folk- 
lore to have been produced, embodying variants of the several 
legends and incorporating additions derived from living oral 
tradition by successive compilers. The work of the final 
editor of J, like that of the redaetor who united it with E, 
would probably consist less in the collection of oral material 
at first hand than in the more purely literary process of 
blending and rewriting the different narratives of his prede- 
cessors, adapting them to his own purpose and point of 
view, and impressing upon the material thus worked up the 
thought of the generation or the circle which he represented, 
or, it may be, the results of his own reflection. This, however, 
is but probable conjecture. The time is perhaps yet distant 
when we shall be able to define the relation of the ‘author’ 
of our narrative to his work?. 
banishes ii. 8, but only the word ‘Eden’ in v. 15. According to this writer’s 
criticism, there would be no mention in the main narrative of the name Eden. 
According to the emendation of Budde and Robertson Smith (cf. Loisy, of. cit), 
man would not be represented as intended for agricultural labour, before the act 


of disobedience, even in so small a degree as would be implied in the keeping of a 
garden of fruit-trees. 

1 See Lucyclopaedia LBibl., Art. Historical Literature; M°Curdy, of. cit., 
vol. 111. chap. lii. 

> By way of illustrating the variety of possibilities which present themselves, 
the following sentence may be quoted from an Art. by Prof. Toy in the Journal of 
Bibl. Literature, x. p. 1: ‘*The author may be an editor who has retouched the 
less perfect work of a predecessor; or he or some earlier writer may have gathered 
material from several sources, and combined different narratives into one story ; 
or various traditions, growing up under diverse conditions, may have coalesced ; or 
the present narrative may be the result of several or of all these processes—the 
final redactor, for example, may have made selections from narratives, already 
worked over by tradition and by the pen, and treated them in his own way for 
a particular purpose. 


20 Lhe Fall-story [CHAP. 


It may further be borne in mind that the connected 
narrative commencing at Chap. ii. 4 ὁ and continuing through 
Chap. iii. is also complex in another sense than in that 
which has been mentioned. In addition to the literary-critical 
problem which has just been discussed, there is an archaeo- 
logical problem, more closely associated with the inquiries to 
which the two succeeding chapters are to be devoted. Besides 
including, as we have seen to be probable, extracts from more 
than one history dealing with similar subject-matter, the 
passage Gen. il. 4 ὁ----ἴ. also comprises different legendary 
narratives dealing with different subjects. Most critics recog- 
nise the presence of a Creation-story and a Paradise-story; 
and the latter of these would in turn seem to betray signs of 
being compounded of two elements’ quite different in their 
purport. 

These elements, in the’prehistoric time when -traditions 
were only transmitted orally, were once probably independent 
and unconnected units. In the Jahvist document these 
originally independent entities have been welded into a 
continuous history; yet: not so perfectly as to obliterate dis- 
crepancies. It is these several “sagas,” each a whole in itself, 
as Gunkel has recently insisted’, that are to be considered as 
the ultimate units of which Genesis is made up, rather than 
the written sub-sources J,, J, etc., which have been laid under 
contribution in its literary compilation. If the writers of the 
primaeval history may have done much in the way of purg- 
ing, adapting, arranging and blending their material, they 
took little or no part, in all probability, in the creation 
of its substance and imagery. This was rather the work 


1 For details see Toy, of. cit., p. 12, and Gunkel, of. czt. S. 21—24. Such a 
theory seems necessary to account for some of the discrepancies which com- 
mentators have observed in the narrative. Clemen (Lehre von der Stinde) thinks 
that a Hebrew sin-story became afterwards modified into, or welded with, a 
culture-legend, giving the present narrative. 

2 Op. cit., S. xix. The introduction to this commentary, perhaps the most 
important on Genesis in existence, contains much that is indispensable to the 
future student. Its author, in calling attention to the probable long continuance 
of much of the contents of Genesis in the state of oral tradition, makes an im- 
portant advance in the science of criticism for which several investigators had 
already recognised that the time was ripe. In more than one passage free-use 
has here been made of Prof. Gunkel’s Introduction. 


1| and its Exegesis 21 


of the people collectively. When the stories came to be 
for the first time reduced to writing they were already of 
high antiquity; they had existed as unwritten folk-lore for 
many generations, and different elements in them are perhaps 
of very different age. It was during this period of oral trans- 
mission that the variants of the myths arose, of whose exist- 
ence we have some evidence in Genesis itself and in other 
parts of the Old Testament. Distortion, embellishment and 
elimination, due to the inherent impossibility of oral tradition 
to keep itself pure and unaltered, and also deliberate adapta- 
tion to changed circumstances of life and diverse stages of 
religious development, must inevitably have affected the form 
of the folk-lore of the Hebrews during the interval between 
their settlement in Canaan and the commencement of a 
national literature after the establishment of the kingdom. 
The purification of this folk-lore from nature-myth and poly- 
theistic association, largely accomplished in the Jahvist source 
though still leaving room for further expurgation and refine- 
ment in the Priestly Code, belongs, perhaps, mostly to the 
beginning of the literary period. Grosser elements may have 
been eliminated, of course, whilst the narratives were still 
handed down by word of mouth; the process, doubtless, was 
gradual. Myths originally relating to profane subjects may 
have already come, in prehistoric times, to embody a religious 
motive. Independent explanations of the origin of different 
things would become welded into a single complex story. 
Touches of native colouring would inevitably here and there 
replace details in an exotic myth; whilst elements derived 
from foreign sources would become permanently incorporated 
in traditions of purely Hebrew origin. From such general 
considerations as these with regard to the possible or probable 
history of Hebrew legends during the pre-literary age, it may 
be inferred that the thorough analysis of any one of them, 
and the tracing of its several elements to their ultimate 
sources, must form, in the present state of our knowledge, a 
problem not admitting of complete solution. The subjects 
discussed in the present and the succeeding chapter are 
matters upon which an enormous amount has been written 
but about which very little is certainly known. 


ει ἘΠ eld Gb: 


THE ETHNOLOGICAL ORIGIN AND RELATIONS 
OF THE FALL-STORY, 


IT is the purpose of the present chapter to commence 
inquiry into the previous history of the contents of the 
Jahvist narrative of the Fall, by collecting from the field of 
comparative religion such evidence as there may be of con- 
nexion between it and the corresponding legends of other 
peoples. 

It is an easy matter to find, in the literature of ancient 
nations or in the traditions of modern uncivilised races, stories 
in some degree parallel to, or containing elements in common 
with, the Hebrew account of the first man and his fall. But 
to assign the true cause for such similarities in particular 
cases is, in the present state of knowledge, for the most part 
far beyond our power. To determine how much of the 
similarity is due to actual borrowing on one side or the other, 
and on which; how much to inheritance from a common stock 
of traditions; how much to the psychological unity of man- 
kind, to the fact, that is, that human thought, on the same 
level of culture, proceeds to a great extent in accordance with 
the same psychological laws and evolves more or less similar 
products; and, finally, how much to mere coincidence: this is 
a task for which our generation is not equipped. Before we 
are able to trace relations of actual dependence, except in the 
case of a few points of detail, great advances in the collection 
and, more especially, in the critical sifting of material must 
be made. At the present time there is an insufficiency of 
data accessible to the theologian to guarantee much valuable 


ΓΗ. 11] Ethnological Origin and Relations, etc. 23 


progress. We have to remain content, for the most part, 
with merely laying the parallels side by side, and with stating 
the various conjectures to which their study has given rise. 
Perhaps the whole important question of the relationship of 
Hebrew ‘origins’ to the myths of other races, Semitic and 
Aryan, will continue in its present unsatisfactory condition 
until the yozzt labours of specialists in the various branches of 
Semitic and Aryan ancient literature respectively will supply 
a sufficiency of material, historically and critically sifted, to 
warrant trustworthy conclusions. Of course future explora- 
tions may supply knowledge which will considerably modify 
our present provisional views. We expect further light not 
only from Babylonia, which has been but partially explored, 
but also from Phoenicia, where excavation may scarcely be 
said to have been begun. And with this confident hope 
within us it is easy to believe that advancing knowledge will 
render some of our present conjectures worthless. As a 
recent author has said: one who writes now on the results of 
comparative study of cosmological and other legends “is 
writing on the sand with a rising tide.” 

It is only possible here to endeavour to present to the 
student, as systematically as the nature of the subject will 
allow, such results of the labours of investigators in various 
departments of comparative religion as are generally known 
in regard to the connexion of the Hebrew Fall-story with the 
folk-lore of other nations. In doing so, it will be easy to 
enable him to realise that, though resort to the specialist in 
each department of research concerned is quite essential, it 
is necessary to remember that the inevitable “preoccupied 
aloofness” of each from the fields of other specialists will 
frequently render authoritative expressions of opinion mis- 
leading until they have been checked and qualified by similar 
pronouncements from those whose studies have lain in another 
department of ancient literature. The student of cuneiform 
writings is apt to explain Hebrew legends by exclusive 
reference to Babylonian parallels; the expert in oriental 
studies usually over-emphasises the similarities presented by 
Iranian literature,'to the neglect of those which appear in 
Semitic records; the specialist in the accessible traces of 


24 The Ethnological Origin and  [ CHAP. 


Semitic thought, recoverable from the early religion of Arabia 
and of the nations most closely akin in relationship and 
culture to the nomadic Hebrews themselves, sometimes 
writes in forgetfulness of the close bond, possibly amounting 
to literary dependence, between Israel and highly-civilised 
Assyria: and thus particular problems are apt to be presented, 
even by the most competent authorities, as much less complex 
than they really are. 


Elements derived from the early religion of nomadic 
Lsvael and kindred peoples. 


The early religion, and indeed the early history, of Israel 
are unfortunately wrapped in uncertainty and obscurity. 
There is no doubt that the ancestors of the heterogeneous 
people which eventually settled in Canaan were for a long 
period pastoral and nomadic tribes’. And inasmuch as the 
native traditions of all races are strongly coloured by the 
circumstances of their life, this fact should supply a test as © 
to whether certain elements in the early biblical narratives 
were earlier or later than the settlement in Canaan. We 
know from the account in Genesis of patriarchal times that 
the Hebrews, long after they had become an agricultural 
people, had lively remembrances of the conditions of their 
former nomadic life. The question must be raised, therefore, 
whether the story of Paradise, of the temptation and trans- 
gression of Adam and Eve, contains elements which can be 
regarded as native products of the common thought of the 
Hebrews at this early stage of their history. It is not 
perhaps very profitable to attempt to decide on general or 
a priort grounds what forms of speculation were possible, 
and what were not, to a relatively uncivilised pastoral people 
such as the Israelites are generally supposed to have been 
previously to their absorption of Canaanitish culture. Of 
course it is impossible to believe that they then possessed 
such a story as the narrative of the Fall in the form in which 
it occurs in Gen. iii. On the other hand it is impossible to 


1 For a concise account of the successive Semitic immigrations into W. Asia 
from Arabia see Der Alte Orient, 1° Jahrgang (Leipzig, 1900), S. 1 ff. 


1 | Relations of the Fall-story 25 


believe that they did not possess myths or legends of some 
kind; and, perhaps, amongst them, conceptions which in more 
developed or more modified form are woven into that portion 
of the Jahvist history. Whether this was actually the case 
only becomes a subject for possible investigation when we 
identify Israel, as we well may at so remotely ancient a 
time, with the Semitic races to which it was most nearly 
akin. | 

But we cannot pursue this inquiry far on account of the 
paucity of the information at our disposal. If the Edomites, 
Ammonites, Moabites and Aramaeans possessed any legends 
or myths relating to the beginnings of human history and 
comparable to those contained in the early chapters of Genesis, 
they have perished. Of the traditions of the pre-Mohammedan 
Arabs, also, extremely little has been allowed to remain; and 
amongst that little there seems to be no trace of a story 
anclogous to that of Gen. iii. The South Arabians in par- 
ticular, who, as they practised an elaborate cult, presumably 
had a much more highly developed mythology than the 
Bedouins of Central Arabia, have bequeathed to us nothing 
but inscriptions from which we can learn scarcely more than 
the names of their gods and fragments of ceremonial’. This 
is the more unfortunate because, had fuller information from 
this source been forthcoming, it would have thrown more 
im.portant light on the more primitive beliefs of the Hebrews 
thian most of that which has been obtained from Babylonia, 
whose 1eligious literature supplies us chiefly with an extremely 
elaborate mythology, artificially systematised in the interests 
of poutics and priestcraft. 

The possible traces of nomadic Hebrew, or of undiffer- 
entiated Semitic, tradition in the Paradise-story may be 
briefly mentioned here; the fuller discussion of some of them 
belongs more properly to the succeeding chapter. 

is not until we arrive at the 20th verse of Gen. lil, 

[δὲ we meet with the proper name Eve. The verse, as has 
already been observed, is suspected, though not proved, to 
1 For some account of these inscriptions, and of the early history of the Arabs 


in so far as it is known, see Weber, Avabien vor dem Islam (Der Alte Ortent, 


3°" Jahrg.). 


26 The Ethnological Origin and |CHAP. 


be a later addition. In any case the verse is by no means 
an essential part of the narrative to which it is attached. 
The meaning of Eve (Havvah) is extremely uncertain. If the 


word be more than ‘a Hebraised form of a name in a non- 


Hebraic story!, there are other possibilities than that suggested 
by Robertson Smith*, who saw in the word a phonetic varia- 
tion of Zayy, a group of female kinship. Taken in connexion 
with Gen. il. 24 (“therefore shall a man leave his father and 
his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they twain 
shall be one flesh”), with Jacob’s marriages, and other incidents 
of Old Testament history which appear to refer to what is 
called deena marriage, this verse has seemed to some scholars 
to contain an allusion to the primitive institution of ‘mother- 
descent’ or matriarchate, and therefore a reminiscence of the 


distant past. The suggestion, however, has not been very 
generally received®. 


The site of Eden has been assigned sometimes to Aratia, 
where, as is now fairly generally agreed, was once the common 


1 Encycl. Bibl., τ. Art. Adam and Eve. 

2 Kinship and Marriage, p. 177. According to other views, the word means 
(a) ‘living creature’; (4) ‘life’—a fem. abstract—see, e. g., Baethgen, Bertrage su 
Semit. Rel. Geschichte, 1888, S. 148 Anm.; (c) ‘serpent,’ see Wellhausen, Pro/eg., 
(895, S. 3133; Compos. des Hex., 1889, 5. 343; Reste Arab. Heidentums, 18397, 
S. 154; Noldeke, Z. D. MW. G., xlii. 487; Zucycl. Bibl., loc. cit. Most of thiese 
references and the following facts have been kindly supplied by Mr N. M*Le>an, 
of Christ’s College. In Arabic, Aayya means (i) ‘living creature,’ (ii) ‘serpent.’ 
Syriac uses a closely related form for (i), but for ‘serpent’ apparently uses a deeri- 
vative of the same root, and for the first y substitutes the kindred letter τὸ. Ja 
Ethiopic an entirely different word, avewé, combines the same two meanings. Thie 
meaning ‘serpent,’ in Arabic and Syriac, may be derived from that of ‘living 
creature.’ In this case Wellhausen and Noldeke’s interpretation of ‘Eve’ would 
seem more improbable. To these statements it may be added that the above 
suggestion, of the derivation of the meaning ‘serpent’ from that of ‘living 
creature,’ is one which comparative mythology strongly confirms. On the other 
hand, many facts are explained (see Wellhausen) by identifying Eve with serpent. 
For instance, it is stated that Ethiopian legend places a serpent at the head of 
the human race as its ancestor. On Jastrow’s view that the serpent of Gen. is an 
etymological confusion for Eve, see below, pp. 41, 43. 

3 For criticism of it see Hastings’ Dict. of the Bible, Art. Marriag. Cf. 
Jastrow in Amer. Journal of Semit. Languages, Xv. No. 4, p- 207- Barton, in 
his Sketch of Semit. Origins, tells us that deera marriage was common to many 
Semitic races; that matriarchate, however, in the light of recent investigation, 
turns out to have been limited to a few races under special conditions: and he adds 
(p. 41), ‘the whole subject merits a new examination.” 


II | Relations of the Fall-story 27 


home of the Semitic peoples. Glaser has argued, on geo- 
graphical and other grounds, that the account of the situation 
of Paradise given in Gen. ii. 10o—14 was intended to locate it 
in that country’. But the identity of the river Pishon and 
the situation of Havilah are questions of great uncertainty ; 
and most authorities hold opinions opposed to this, as will 
presently be seen. 

The reference in Gen. ili. 22 to the plurality of Elohim- 
beings is a survival of the old Nature-religion common to 
Israel, before and immediately after its entrance into Canaan, 
and kindred Semitic races. Such reminiscences are not un- 
common in the Jahvist record; and if this document, as is 
widely maintained, emanated from Judah, it may be pertinent 
to the inquiry with which we are here concerned to bear in 
mind that the Southern kingdom was not so thoroughly 
leavened with Canaanitish influences as the Northern; that 
it was affected by intercourse with Arab and other nomadic 
tribes, and was more tenacious.of pre-Mosaic traditions. 

The conception of the Paradise itself, and of its planting 
by Jahveh, has been regarded by Robertson Smith as _ be- 
longing to the same circle of ideas as the oldest forms of the 
Semitic conception of the ‘Baal-land, a favoured spot, or 
oasis, such as would seem to be planted and watered by the 
hand of the local god, the giver of its fertility. The idea of 
a divinely planted garden would be a development, bound up 
with the growth of agricultural society, of the more primitive 
idea of the god’s special home on earth Such a conception 
as the garden would be impossible to nomadic tribes, and 
would seem to be derived, like the Baal-worship with which 
it is associated, from the agricultural Northern Semites. 

It is not to be confounded with that of the Z27@* of central 


1 Skizze der Geschichte τε. Geographte Arabiens, τι. S. 317—357- Sprenger, 
and also Hommel (Die Alt-Jsrael. Ueberlicferung, S. 314 ff.), have maintained 
a similar view. In a recent work, Fiinf Neue Arab. Landschafisnamen im A. 
Testament, Prof. Konig combats Hommel’s view. 

* Religion of the Semiites, 1889, pp. 98, 106. Gunkel, Genesis, in loc., holds 
the similar view that the Jahvist account of Paradise is a description of an oasis in 
the desert. See also Barton’s view mentioned below, p. 71. 

3 The word ἀέρι is derived from a root signifying ‘protect,’ and denotes an 
enclosed piece of land upon which it was usually forbidden to fell trees, to hunt 


28 The Ethnological Origin and  [ CHAP. 


Arabia, which is based on the idea of ¢adov rather than on 
that of property, though, like the garden, a development 
of the idea of a divine abode. The garden of Eden is a 
divine homestead rather than a sanctuary ; it is the conception 
of an agricultural, not a nomadic, state of’ society, but in all 
probability it is nevertheless only the development, carried 
out at a later time, of the transplanted conception of the 
fertile haunt of the divine beings of the original Semite. 

The tempter of the Paradise-story may well be a native 
conception, a survival of the primitive Hebrew animism on 
which the Jewish demonology is based, and perhaps also of 
the totemism of which traces occur in the Old Testament. 
“The demoniac character of the serpent in the garden of 
Eden is unmistakable; the serpent is not a mere temporary 
disguise of Satan, otherwise its punishment would be meaning- 
less. The practice of serpent charming, repeatedly referred 
to in the Old Testament, is also connected with the demoniac 
character of the creature’.” The zzz of the Arabs and other 
Semites, often closely associated with the serpent, would seem 
to embody a similar conception to that which underlies early 
Semitic magic. The 2227: of some trees are said to take the 
form of the serpent’, and the facts that, in the story of the 
temptation of Eve, the serpent is regarded as clever rather than 


game or to shed blood. Such holy places were sometimes associated with the 
graves of heroes by the Arabs, as well as assigned to the gods. They were fre- 
quently well-watered and fertile tracts, and were originally regarded as haunts of 
divine beings or 772. The animals and vegetation upon them were considered 
as instinct with divine life. They were the most ancient sanctuaries. See 
Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, lect. 1v. ; Goldziher, Muhammedanische 
Studien, 1. S. 235 ff. ; Wellhausen, Reste Arab. Hetdentums, Ὁ. 1o1 ff.; Holzinger, 
Genesis, in loc., has suggested that the Aimd is the root idea of Paradise; this 
is impossible, but the 4zd@ and Paradise are probably divergent developments 
of the Baal-land or oasis. 

According to Kremer, Die Srid-Arab. Sagen, S. 19, the ancient Arabs seem 
to have had a tradition of original giant inhabitants, ruled over by Seddad, who 
built ‘the earthly Paradise.’ But this was an enchanted city, and therefore the 
tradition is of late origin. 

1 Robertson Smith, of. cit., 1889, pp. 423-45 1894, p- 442. 

2 Op. cit.. 1889, p. 113, and references there. The same work may be con- 
sulted for further facts about the ji. See also Noldeke, Zeitschr. fiir Votker- 
Psychologie, 1860, S. 412 ff., for interesting information on the serpent-7z2 of 
early Arabia. 


11 | Relations of the Fall-story 209 


evil, and is closely connected with the tree of knowledge, 
also point towards the most primitive Semitic demonology, or 
animism, and possibly magic, as the source of the figure which, 
in the Jahvist narrative, leads the first parents to their fall. It 
would certainly seem most probable in the present state of 
our knowledge that this element in the Fall-story will receive 
its genetic explanation in a survival of such extremely 
primitive Semitic thought}. 

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the plement 
of the Paradise-story to which it has hitherto been most 
difficult to adduce any parallel. Robertson Smith expressed 
the view that it was a conception common to the Northern 
Semites, but seems to have left us no information as to its 
derivation and significance. It has been compared to the 
oracle-trees mentioned in the Book of Judges and elsewhere 
in the Old Testament, which certainly were an element in 
early Semitic superstition® But unlike such trees, the one 
in question communicates its virtue only through being eaten. 
If it be a creation of the writer of the Jahvist story, as some 
have thought, or an interpolation of his into a legend which 
had hitherto only spoken of a tree of life, its function may 
possibly have been suggested to him by the familiar oracle- 
tree, whilst its mode of action may have been assimilated 
to that of the tree already figuring in his tradition. A more 
probable derivation is discussed below’. 


1 For an interesting corroborative suggestion see the remarks on the curse 
of the serpent in Hastings’ Dict. of the Bible, Art. Demon (i. p. 500 π.), and the 
quotation there given from Doughty’s Arabia Deserta. See also Baudissin, Set. 
eltgionsgesthichte. Jastrow (Amer. Journal of Semit. Languages, XV. No. 4, 
p- 209) conjectures that the serpent of Gen. iii. is an addition to the original story, 
due to the confusion of the Hebrew names for serpent and Eve. See above, p. 26. 
It does not read, however, as Cheyne has remarked, like an afterthought. 

One looks forward with interest to the Art. on Serpent in the Aucycl. Bibi., in 
the hope that it may contain some matter, hitherto unpublished, from the pen of 
the late W. R. Smith. 

Further discussion of the Fall-story in the light of primitive ‘common Semitic’ 
ideas will be found in the following chapter. 

5 Lenormant, Les Origines de l'histoire, 1880, i. p. 86f., states that the pre- 
Mohammedan Arabs and the ancient Phoenicians possessed similar trees. See 
also Arts. in Bible Dictionaries on A/agic, Divination, etc.; Baudissin, of. czt., 
Ir. 5. 227 

3 Barton’s view: see ch. iii. 


30 The Ethnological Origin and [(ΗΑΡ. 


It may be concluded from what has so far been said that, 
though there are at least some traces of extremely ancient 
Semitic conceptions, going back to remotely prehistoric times, 
in the details of the Fall-story!, there is no evidence at all 
that it was possessed by the Hebrews in its entirety before 
their entrance into Canaan. There are no signs that the 
narrative, in its existing form and with its present didactic 
import, was a native product of nomadic Israel ; and some of 
its elements seem certainly to have been derived from a 
people of settled agricultural life*. 


1 It will be seen at a later page in this chapter, and also in the next, that there 
is a considerable amount of evidence, of more than one kind, pointing to the 
conclusion that, though the didactic implications of the story were a result of 
Hebraisation of borrowed material, its basis consists mainly of tradition which, 
by no means the creation of civilised Babylonia, originally bore a very different 
significance, and could arise only in an extremely primitive state of society. 

2 The curse of the ground for Adam’s sake (Gen. iii. 17) is not necessarily 
to be understood, as has been thought by Goldziher and others, to be the ex- 
pression of the nomad’s contempt for agriculture. The fact that the Paradise-story 
takes it for granted that man was intended to be an agriculturist from the first 
(Gen. ii. 5, 15), is a proof that its aetiological signification was conceived, and 
impressed upon the narrative, after nomadic life had become a thing of the past. 
It is true, as we have seen above, that some critics have been inclined to regard 
these references to the keeping and tilling of the garden as an interpolation con- 
trary to the spirit of the Jahvist writing. This would seem perhaps a little 
unnecessary ; for the light and easy work which appears to be implied in such 
an occupation need not be identified with the field-labour whose toilsomeness 
resulted from man’s sin. But in any case the allusion to agriculture as the lot 
of man in his present state, and as a toil whose laboriousness, at any rate, calls 
for explanation, is a proof that this element in the story, if not the gist of the 
story as a whole, was received by the Hebrews from the people who taught them 
agricultural pursuits in Canaan, or else was invented by themselves subsequently 
to their occupation of that country. Presupposing, as it does, the conditions of 
civilised life, the story can hardly have been brought from the desert. As to 
which of the alternatives just mentioned is the more probable, it is precarious 
to argue further merely from the allusion to agricultural labour. In some parts of 
Palestine such an occupation was easy; in other parts it was hard, and the land 
is spoken of (Numb. xiii, 32) as one “that eateth up the inhabitants thereof.” 
There is no doubt that the earlier prophets represent the happy and peaceful 
national future to which they look forward as an age of agricultural life (Amos 
ix. 13, Hos. xiv. 7, Isai. ii. 4), and it is certain that the fact that such pursuits 
had been learned from the foreigner had been forgotten (Isai. xxviii. 26 ff.), so 
that agriculture had come to be looked upon as a divine institution. Yet Israel 
perfectly well remembered its nomadic and pastoral days, as we see from the 
narratives of Cain and Abraham. Some have therefore concluded that we have, 


11] Relations of the Fall-story 31 


Now there is no doubt that after their settlement west of 
the Jordan, and the change of life consequent thereupon, the 
Israelites derived most of their civilisation, arts and culture 
from the Canaanitish peoples with whom they were brought 
into so intimate relationship. We know, too, how easily, 
after the settlement, Hebrew religion absorbed into itself 
elements of the lower religions of these kindred races. It is- 
highly probable, then, that the Israelites largely imbibed the 
traditions current among the Canaanites and used them in 
reconstructing the ‘history of origins’ which we find in 
Genesis. But there is reason to believe that the legends and 
folk-lore thus rendered accessible to the Hebrews would be 
made up of very mixed elements. Phoenician culture and 
religion had already been influenced by centuries of close 
connexion with Egypt, and by intercourse with Assyria, long 
before the Israelite immigration into Canaan’. Babylonian 
mythology was therefore within reach some centuries before 
Israel’s literary activity began, and it is most probable that 
such Babylonian influence as is traceable in the narratives of 
the Jahvist source was derived at this period®. 

But the Phoenicians and Canaanites were a medium 


in the Fall-story, an example of unassimilated borrowing. Others have deduced 
the same conclusion from the pessimistic view which the story takes of agricultural 
labour, and remark that Egypt or Babylon, with their arduous irrigation work, 
would seem to be the natural home of such an outlook. Such arguments, how- 
ever, lose sight of personal idiosyncrasy and temperament, as well as of variety in 
the conditions of life in different districts of one country. Alongside of the 
passages referred to above, we must put the allusions to agricultural labour as 
a heavy burden; e.g. 1 Sam. viii. 12, Isai. Ixi. 5, Zech. xiii. 5, Ecclus. vi. 19. 
In this connexion the verse Ecclus. vii. 15 is interesting, as we there get the two 
aspects placed side by side: 
** Hate not laborious work ; 
Neither husbandry, which the Most High hath ordained (created).” 

1 See Benzinger, Hebraische Archaologie, 5. 66-7. The Tel-el-Amarna 
tablets (c. 1400 B.C.), which contain letters addressed by governors in Phoenicia, 
Syria and Palestine to the king of Egypt, show that the diplomatic language in 
these countries was Babylonian. Inasmuch as some of the tablets contain mythical 
legends they show also that the literature, as well as the language, of Babylonia 
was current at least in Egypt. King, Zhe Babylonian Religion, p. 118 ff.; see 
also Der Alte Orient, τὸν Jahrg. S. 37 ff. 

2 This view seems to be now established. For its exposition and vindication 
see Gunkel, Schépfung τι. Chaos, 1895, S. 146—155, and Zimmern, δ᾽ 1]. und 
Babyl. Urgeschichte, in Der Alte Orient, 2*** Jahrg. S. 71-88, 107-8. 


32 The Ethnological Origin and [CHAP. 


through which other influences than those of Egypt and 
Babylonia may have reached the Hebrews in the centuries 
immediately preceding the writing of their earliest history. 
Both Phoenicia and Babylonia had intercourse with Persia ; 
and interchange of culture and mythology between Phoenicia 
and Greece goes back, perhaps, to the pre-Homeric age’. It 
is, of course, a very remote possibility that at this early date 
influences from these sources were received, in the slightest 
degree, by the Hebrews. But the bare possibility is worth 
recording, even if no practical results are to be traced thereto. 

In discussing the points of similarity between the biblical 
Fall-story and kindred legendary traditions of other ancient 
nations, it will be essential to bear in mind that, as to the 
traditions of Phoenicia and other Canaanitish peoples, which 
it would be of the first importance to us to know, we are 
almost altogether ignorant:; whilst provisional conclusions 
formed from Babylonian parallels may at any time be modi- 
fied or reversed by further discoveries. 


Phoentcian Parallels. 


The Jahvist account of the beginnings of human culture 
contained in Gen. iii. and-iv. certainly seems to have affinities 
with the fragments of ancient Phoenician folk-lore handed 
down, probably in much distorted form, by Philo Byblus and 
preserved by Eusebius*. In one of these fragments a being, 
Aeon, who would seem to correspond to Eve, is said to have 
discovered the use of the fruit of trees for food®. The first 
clothing is said to have been invented later, and to have con- 
sisted of the skins of animals. Its use is expressly associated 
with the origin of animal sacrifice. These ideas would seem 


1 Preller, Griechische Mythologie, 1872, 1. 8. 8. 

2 Praep. Evang. Lib. I. c. x. The Phoenician account of the earliest stages of 
civilisation has points of agreement with Gen. iv. which have suggested identity of 
origin for the two histories. It is at least possible that the Phoenician stories are 
based on Genesis. See Renan, AM/émoires de [ Académie des Inscriptions, XXII. 
part ll., p. 259. 

3 Eira φησι γεγενῆσθαι ἐκ τοῦ Κολπία ἀνέμου, καὶ γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ Βάαν, τοῦτο δὲ 
νύκτα ἑρμηνεύειν, Αἰώνα καὶ ἸἹΙρωτόγονον θνητοὺς ἄνδρας, οὕτω καλουμένους. Evpety 
δὲ τὸν Αἰῶνα τὴν ἀπὸ τῶν δένδρων τροφήν. 


Π] Relations of the Fall-story 33 


to be vestiges of a myth of a golden age of fruit-eating which 
possibly arose, like the corresponding Greek tradition, out of 
sacrificial ritual, and of whose existence among the ancient 
Phoenicians there is other evidence’. This tradition appears 
to be known to the Jahvist compiler, and has been considered 
by some to be implied in Isai. xi. 6 ff, We meet with a 
belief in a golden age also in Egyptian mythology?, which 
was laid under contribution by the Phoenician cosmogony 
described by Philo Byblus. 

These fragments of Phoenician legend do not carry us far; 
they imply, what might have been guessed without them, 
that similar subjects to those discussed in the early narratives 
of Genesis occupied Phoenician thought, and were dealt with 
in a similar way. But they supply us with no parallel to the 
Fall-story*. 

The absence of information ‘as to indisputably ancient 
Phoenician legend is most deplorable to the student of the 
sources and origin of the Hebrew Fall-story. For if we can 
dimly conjecture the probable objects and conceptions in 
which the primitive legend underlying this story took its 
rise, and can trace, in such Babylonian literature as we possess, 
the existence of ideas and associations of ideas which throw 
light upon the development and modification of such legend 
on Babylonian soil, we have to remember that it was almost 
certainly in a form modified by Phoenician influences that 
Babylonian lore was received by the Hebrews on their 
entrance into Canaan. Moreover there are elements, not only 
in the teaching, but also in the original mythical material, of 
the story, such as its apparent implication of something like 

1 On this point see W. R. Smith, of. cét. Lect. viii., especially Ὁ. 288 ff. 
(ed. 1889). 

2 See below, p. 34. 

3 Lenormant alleges evidence that the Phoenicians possessed a story similar 
in nature to that of Gen. ili., of. czt., 1. p. 93; cf. Renan’s paper referred to 
above, p. 32; but not much can be built from these data. Fergusson, 77ee and 
Serpent Worship, 1873, p- τι, states that representations of a serpent coiled round 
a tree occur on Phoenician coins; the very fact that they occur on coins makes it 
improbable that they allude to the figures of the Fall-story. The analogy between 
elements in this narrative, and the legend of the garden of the Hesperides, which 


Lenormant (of. c7t.) asserts to be incontestably of Phoenician origin, is discussed 
below, p. 53 f. 


Tr: 3 


34 Lhe Ethnological Origin αὐ [CHAP. 


a golden age, to which the cuneiform literature supplies 
nothing parallel. There is therefore a most important link 
missing in the chain of development connecting the Jahvist 
story with its conjectured prehistoric and animistic basis?: 
a link which a survey of such knowledge and speculation as 
has been accumulated on the subject would lead one to 
suppose to be essential to the reconstruction of the history 
of this interesting tradition. The deficiency of Phoenician 
legendary literature such as might throw light upon the 
Paradise-story in the stage of its development which im- 
mediately preceded its Hebraisation, should in itself make 
us cautious in accepting, as a complete key or parallel, any of 
the various legends from Babylonia or elsewhere which have 
been thought to have supplied the material of the Jahvist 
writer's story. 


Jes egyptian Parallels. 


There are one or two parallels to portions of the Jahvist 
history of origins in the mythology of Egypt. The con- 
ception of man’s creation out of clay is one of them. Ptah is 
said to have modelled man with his own hands, and Khnama 
to have formed him on a potter's table?» Another is the 
belief in a golden age under Ra. “ Certain expressions used 
by Egyptian writers are in themselves sufficient to show that 
the first generations of men were supposed to have lived ina 
state of happiness and perfection®.” ‘The times of Ra’ was 
apparently a common expression for an ideal age. But 
whilst this was a popular and indigenous legend, there were 
nevertheless Egyptians who, “on the contrary, affirmed that 
their ancestors were born as so many brutes, unprovided with 
the most essential arts of gentle life. They knew nothing of 
articulate speech, and expressed themselves by cries only, 
like other animals, until the day when Thot taught them both 
speech and writing*.” This latter tradition closely resembles 
the Chaldaean legend preserved by Berosus, according to 


1 See next chapter. 

2 Maspero, Dawz of Civilisation, S. P. C. K. 3rd ed. p. 156. 
3 Jbid. p. 158, n.3 ; Lenormant, of. cét., I. p. 58. 

4+ Maspero, of. czt., p. 158. 


1] Relations of the Fall-story 35 


which the first men lived after the manner of beasts until 
Oannes taught them better’. It is by no means necessary to 
suppose, however, that the Jahvist creation story, or the 
Paradise narrative, was indebted to Egyptian influences. 
Creation of man from the clay or dust is an idea which 
occurred spontaneously to many nations, as for instance the 
Babylonians?; and the same of course is true as to the belief 
in a paradisaic age. 

There is evidence of the worship, in ancient Egypt, of both 
the palm tree and of the serpent’, but there has been no 
connexion established between these objects of veneration 
and the imagery of the Fall-story. Wiedemann‘ alludes to 
the cult of a tree at Heliopolis whence the phoenix arose, and 
on whose foliage “Thoth, or else Safekht, the goddess of 
learning, inscribed the name of the king, who by this act 
was endowed with immortal life.’” This association of a tree 
of life with the goddess of learning is of interest as possibly 
implying the same connexion of ideas as some would detect 
in Gen. 1ii.; but of course there is no parallel to the Fall-story. 

In spite, therefore, of the close relations of Israel with 
Egypt implied in the story of the bondage, there seem to be 
no definite traces of Egyptian influences on Hebrew thought 
and institutions’; and there are probably no indications of 
developed Egyptian mythology having been absorbed by 
Israel. 

Our attention has recently been called, however, to the 
existence in hieroglyphic Egyptian of the elements of a story 
similar to what Prof. Barton, in his recent Sketch of Semitic 
Origins®, takes to have been the germ of the Hebrew narrative 
lbid., p. 546. Cf. also Greek traditions, pp. 52, 53, below. 

See below, p. 39. 
Maspero, of. ctt., Ὁ. 121. 
Religion of the ancient Egyptians, 1897, pp. 156, 157. Wiedemann adds : 
‘it is however a curious fact that the palm, a tree otherwise so intimately 
associated with Egyptian thought and feeling, may be said to have no place in 
this cult.”” This is of interest in connexion with what is said below of Barton’s 
theory of the tree of knowledge. Massey, Matural Genesis, 1. 382, states that 
Thot is elsewhere associated with the palm, but gives no reference. 

5 Renanf, Aibbert Lectures, Ὁ. 243f. “1 may be confidently asserted that 


neither Hebre-vs nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt.” 
δ See below, ;, 69 ff. 


1 
2 
3 
4 


K fares” 


36 The Ethnological Origin and [(ΗΑΡ, 


of Paradise and the Fall, in extremely ancient times. Prof. 
Barton tells us that he derived this information from Prof. 
W. Max Miiller, to whose forthcoming work the student will 
therefore look forward with eagerness. Through the kindness 
of this latter scholar the present writer is enabled to state 
that no complete story analogous to the narrative of the Fall 
is to be found in ancient Egyptian literature, but that scattered 
allusions exist which show that almost all its elements, the 
serpent, the rivers and trees of Paradise, and the idea that 
death was due to the ancestress of woman, were known in the 
earliest Egyptian religion. If this should be proved to be the 
case, a most interesting problem will be presented to the 
student of the sources of the Fall-story; but speculation on 
the matter will not be profitable before the publication of 
Prof. W. Max Miiller’s work. 


Babylonian Parallels. 


It is universally admitted that some of the early narratives 
of Genesis, to whatever stratum of the hexateuch they belong, 
show obvious traces of indebtedness to Babylonian tradition. 
The borrowing, however, is by no means either wholesale or 
always direct. The differences between the Hebrew stories 
and those supplied by Babylonian literature are perhaps even 
more striking than the resemblances. This fact, and also the 
tenacity of the hold which some of the narratives containing 
borrowed elements took upon the thought of Israel, point 
rather to indirect derivation’. It has already been stated that 
the Canaanites were the medium through which such in- 
fluences could easily be accessible to the Hebrews. It remains 
to enumerate the possible cases of adopted Babylonian tradi- 
tion, or of ‘undivided Semitic’ conceptions which reached the 
Hebrews from Babylonian soil, and bear the signs of Baby- 
lonian local colouring. 

The Jahvist account of Paradise stands in very close con- 
nexion with what is commonly spoken of as a Jahvist account 
of the Creation. Some writers, regarding Gen. ii. 44 ff. as 


1 Cf. M. Jastrow, in Jewish Quart. Review, July ‘gor. 


11 | Relations of the Fall-story 37 


a practically complete Creation-story’, have argued that it 
implies the existence of quite different climatic conditions in 
the place of its origin than those exhibited in Gen. 1., which 
are certainly Babylonian, and such as point to a barren wilder- 
ness as, é.g., the Syro-Arabian desert. If this view be correct, 
the narrative can hardly be said to be an account of the 
making of the world. A creation-story must begin further 
back than with an existing solid world, even if its imagery be 
drawn from scenes of desert life. It is, however, both possible 
and natural to regard the narrative, with its abrupt commence- 
ment, as a fragment whose beginning has been cut off to 
avoid repetition of previous subject-matter. Indeed instances 
of verbal similarity between it and Babylonian writings 
have been pointed out which have suggested, though per- 
haps not very convincingly, that it is a mutilated borrowed 
story, The phenomena which it implies, as another writer 
has observed, are such as would be witnessed by the first 
colonists of Babylonia on the occasion of the yearly inunda- 
tions of the Euphrates and Tigris, before these were controlled 
by a system of irrigation-channels, 

Again, the description of the site of Eden in Chap. ii. 
10—1I4 is generally considered to be an interpolation of Baby- 
lonian origin, reproducing Babylonian words in Hebraised 
form*. And even when these doubtful verses have been 
eliminated there remain suggestions that the tradition is of 
foreign origin’. Parallels to the description of the garden of 


1 As, δ, οὶ, Gunkel, of. cit.; Zimmern, in Der Alte Ortent, 2'* Jahrg. S. 88 ἢν; 
Worcester, op. czt. 

* There are correspondences in structure and phraseology, though these cannot 
be pressed, with an Accadian Creation-account published by Pinches in Journ. 
Roy. Asiat. Soc. 1891. See also Jastrow, Religzon of Babylonia and Assyria, 
Pp: 444 ff.; Ancycl. Bibl. art. Creation, 16 and 20. Gen. ii. 5 resembles the line 
‘‘no reed grew and no tree was formed,” though hardly sufficiently to establish 
interdependence. The ‘mist’ of ii. 6 should rather be ‘ flood,’ according to some 
authorities, which would appear to rise ‘from the earth.’ The Babylonian story 
goes on to speak of man being made by Marduk with the help of the potter- 
goddess Aruru (evidently out of clay), then of the creation of the animals, ‘ parks 
and forests,’ and of cities. 

3 See e.g. Schrader, Cusetform Transcriptions and the O.T., ed. 2, vol. I. 
p. 26 ff. 

4 The name ‘Eden’ and the location of the garden in ‘the East.’ Edin was 
the name given to the ‘plain’ of Babylonia (Sayce). See also Emcyc?. Bibi. Art. 
Garden. 


38 Lhe Ethnological Origin and | CHAP. 


Eden can also be adduced from Babylonian legend. In 
the epic of Gilgamesh, Parnapishtim, who is the Noah of 
a Babylonian deluge-story, finds favour with the gods, and 
having been, with his wife, made immortal, is caused by 
Bel “to dwell afar off at the mouth (or confluence) of the 
rivers.” This place Jensen would regard as the Babylonian 
earthly Paradise and the original of the Hebrew Eden’. The 
streams, according to Haupt, are the Euphrates, the Tigris, 
and two others which formerly emptied themselves inde- 
pendently into the Persian Gulf. Others see in the ancient 
town of Eridu, situated near the confluence of the Euphrates 
and ‘Tigris, the prototype of the biblical Eden. This was a 
sanctuary of the gods, ‘the centre of the earth,’ where was a 
grove into which ‘no man hath entered’ and containing a 
famous oracle-tree, a sacred palm ‘with a root of bright 
lapis®. The isle of the blessed was rather an Elysium than 
an Olympus or Paradise; but just as these two conceptions 
coalesce in the mythologies of Greece and Egypt’, so did 
they also in that of the Babylonians. Indeed Jeremias 
adduces strong evidence to show that the ‘island of the 
blessed’ at the confluence or mouth of the rivers was very 
closely connected with Eridu. He also states that the magi- 
cal virtues of Eridu play a conspicuous part in the Babylonian 
mantic literature, and that here Adapa* was created by Ea. 
Further, with this Babylonian Paradise were connected the 
food and water of life, the equivalents of the Greek ambrosia 
and nectar®. 

1 Kosmologie der Babylonter, 5. 212 ff. ; 507 ff. See also Jastrow, of. cit., 
p- 505 ff. Here we have a supernatural place containing magical trees and waters 
(healing plant obtained and lost by Gilgamesh, the spring which cures him of his 
leprosy), and guarded by supernatural beings (the scorpion-men, comparable to 
the cherubim of Paradise). 

* See Hastings’ Dzct. of the Bible, Art. Babylonia; Hogarth, Authority and 
Archaeology, Ὁ. 19 ff.; also below, Additions and Corrections. 

3 Lincke, quoted by Jeremias, Bad.-Assyr. Vorstellungen, S. 93, mentions an 
Egyptain ‘isle of the blessed’ in the fields of peace where the gods dwelt and ate 
of the tree of life. 

4 See below, p. 45. 

® Jeremias, in Der Alte Orient, 1*** Jahrg. 5. g1-98, on Holle u. Paradies bei 
den Babyloniern. 

Gunkel (of. ci.) and Zimmern (Der Alte Orient, 2*** Jahrg. S. go ff.) see in 


Ezek. xlvii. and Rey. xxii. allusions to an older form of Paradise legend, in which 
Paradise was in heaven and the river of life was as prominent a feature as the tree. 


Ir | Relations of the Falt-story 39 


Perhaps the most remarkable Babylonian source of ideas 
and imagery analogous to those of the biblical narratives of 
Adam and his fall is the Eabani legend, which is interwoven 
with that of the hero Izdubar or Gilgamesh. This epic is in 
all probability one of the most ancient stories in existence ; 
at least this may be said of the part of it which deals with 
Eabani, a figure that has evidently come down from hoary 
antiquity. As Prof. Jastrow says, who has devoted a very 
thorough study to this legend, and made many sugges- 
tions with regard to it which at least are of the greatest 
interest, Eabani was used as a suitable person to whom to 
attach traditions relating to the primitive state of man; and 
the description of him belongs to quite a different period of 
culture from that of Gilgamesh with which it came to be 
associated'. Inthe Gilgamesh epic Eabani does not represent 
the first man; he enters upon a world already populated. 
This, however, does not preclude the possibility of his having 
originally been a Babylonian Adam; and the fact that he 
never was so regarded would be no obstacle in the way of the 
Hebrew Adam being derived from him. He is said to have 
been created in order to rival and to combat the hero Gilga- 
mesh, and in the manner of his creation we come upon the 
first conspicuous resemblance between him and the biblical 
first man. For he was made by the goddess Aruru out of a 
piece of clay, as the man of the Paradise narrative was made 
by Jahveh from the dust of the earth. He is represented as 
being as it were half man and half beast, naked and hairy, 
living in a savage state, perfectly at home amongst the 
animals, with whom he eats and drinks and sports. The 
purpose assigned to his creation in the epic is frustrated by 
Gilgamesh sending to him a sacred prostitute, Ukhat, to 
ensnare him? She entices him, ‘unabashed, from the beasts 
to herself: 


1 See this author’s paper on 4dam and Eve in Babylonian Literature, in the 
Amer. Journal of Semitic Languages, vol. Xv. No. 4. 

* This refers to the Ishtar worship to which Herodotus alludes, prevalent in 
Babylonia as in other Semitic countries; cf. Gen. xxxviii. 21; Deut. xxiii. 17. 
The word Ukhat means priestess of Ishtar (A. Jeremias). 


40 The Ethnological Origin and [(ΗΑΡ. 


“Lofty art thou, Eabani, like to a god. 
Why dost thou lie with the beasts? 
Come, I will bring thee to walled Uruk. 
* * # * * 
He yields and obeys her command. 
In the wisdom of his heart he recognised a companion}.” 


Eabani abandons the society of the beasts for the more 
suitable mate who ‘is brought to him, and who is the means 
of rousing him to a sense of his superiority to them. The 
two then proceed to Uruk, “the symbol of civilised exist- 
ence.” At this point the tablet is defective, though there 
appears to be an allusion to festive garments, and, further on, 
a description of a grove which “reminds one forcibly of the 
garden of Eden,” and into which Eabani is introduced for a 
habitation®. 

Now, as Jastrow points out, the Jahvist narrative repre- 
sents Adam as living at first in very close connexion with the 
animals about him; Jahveh’s motive in bringing them to him 
to be ‘named’ may imply that he might possibly have been 
expected to find a companion amongst them®. The idea that 
Adam at first satisfied his desire upon them, like Eabani in 
the Gilgamesh legend (according to Jastrow’s reading of it), 
may possibly be an old Hebrew tradition, as it appears in 
rabbinical haggada*; and many writers have suggested reasons 
for believing that, behind the association of the tree of know- 
ledge with the beginnings of culture, there lay originally that 
of the origin of human passion®. Jastrow further maintains 
that the expression for ‘assigning names’ to the animals in 
Gen. ii. is a euphemism for what the Gilgamesh legend more 
plainly says of Eabani’s relation to them; and if this be the 


1 The translation is from Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 477 ff. 
In the paper above referred to the writer adopts Haupt’s rendering of the first line, 
“thou wilt be like a god.” Cf. Gen. iii. 5. 

2 Jastrow, of. ctt., pp. 479, 481. 

3 This thought has also occurred to Stade (Zettschrift fiir A. T. Wissenschaft, 
1897, S. 210), to Gunkel (Gevests, S. g), and Worcester (of. czt.). 

+ Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, 1. 371 ff. 

In Hershon’s Genesis with a talmudical Commentary, p. 63, it is stated that 
R. Elieser taught (/edamoth, 63 a) that Adam had tried to find a connubial 
partner among all cattle and living creatures, but was only suited when he got Eve. 

5 See below, ch. iii. 


11 | Relations of the Fatt-story 41 


case, the parallel with Genesis becomes still more striking’. 
He also believes that the expressions “brought her unto” 
the man (Gen. il. 22) and “knowledge of good and evil” 
(Gen. ii. 9) are similar. euphemisms, the former of these 
phrases being identical with the usual expression “come in 
unto’; and he interprets Gen. ii. 24 in a similar sense, in 
relation with Adam’s leaving the animals to cleave to his 
wife, instead of as an allusion to the institution of matriarchate. 
The elimination of the serpent from the original Fall-story, as 
a late etymological confusion and a doublet for Eve, a con- 
jecture which we have already had occasion to mention, 
makes the narrative of Genesis still more closely resemble the 
legend of Eabani. That the objectionable features of the 
original Paradise-story, as Jastrow reconstructs it, which the 
Jahvist writer purges away and hints at only by veiled ex- 
pressions, were not remote from the life of the early Hebrews, 
is to be inferred from such passages as Levit. xviii. 23 and 
xx. 15, 16 (cf. Beresch. rabba, on Gen. ii. 16 and 24, and 
legends mentioned in Chaps. VII—Ix. of this work). It re- 
mains to add that Eabani is stated, later on in the epic, to 
have ‘become dust?,” and to have cursed Ukhat for having 
‘brought death’ upon him*®. 

Hitherto in this account of the Eabani legend we have 
followed the interpretation of it given by Prof. Jastrow. 
Dr Worcester, in his book on Genesis, gives independently 
a similar reading of its more essential features. This writer 
also sees in it an account of a being who becomes truly 
human through association with woman instead of with 
the beasts; a being tempted from his contented animal life 
and plunged by her into the toils and struggles which beset 
the state of civilisation: a being, therefore, closely comparable 
with the Adam of the Jahvist writing. 


1 This is rendered questionable by the possibility that we have here an allusion 
to the wisdom which, in some ancient traditions, was ascribed to the first man. 
Cf. below, p. 61f. Jastrow, however, regards his explanation as the only one 
capable of throwing light upon this curious act of naming the animals, which he 
says is meaningless unless ‘to name’ means something more than to name. 
Barton, of. czt., follows Jastrow. 

2 Jastrow, of. cit., p. 490. 

3 721. p. 511. 


42 The Ethnological Origin and [(ΗΑΡ. 


It remains to be seen how far the very plausible argument 
thus given by Prof. Jastrow for the dependence of the Jahvist 
account of our first parents on the legend of Eabani will 
stand the test of expert scrutiny. It must be mentioned that 
Maspero and others had previously read this Babylonian 
legend differently. Maspero! sees in Eabani a satyr or half- 
beast, and takes the story to imply that he had influence over 
the animals till he became incontinent ; then the beasts fled 
from him, whereupon he was filled with fear. He adds that 
Eabani is said to have possessed intelligence “ which embraced 
all things past and future,” which hardly suits Jastrow’s inter- 
pretation. This writer also translates the lines quoted above 
so that they do not necessarily suggest the relation with the 
beasts which Jastrow’s rendering directly attributes to Eabani’. 
One feels, in fact, on reading the Izdubar epic as it is trans- 
lated and interpreted by other scholars, that the plausibility 
of Jastrow’s argument depends somewhat on certain features 
being minimised and certain others being perhaps a little 
over-pressed. A. Jeremias* regards Eabani as a kind of 
Priapus, a god of gardens and fields, and representative of 
unbridled lust; and King# disputes the grounds of Jastrow’s 
identifications. One cannot therefore receive it as finally 
agreed that the Eabani legend supplied the basis for the 
Jahvist narrative of Adam and Eve, much as the suggestion 
seems to have to commend it, and likely enough as it is in 
view of the fact that the deluge-stories of Genesis are un- 
doubtedly mainly of Babylonian origin and one such story is 
contained in the complex epic of Gilgamesh in which the 
Eabani legend is also imbedded®. 

' Dawn of Civilisation, ed. 3, p- 576. 

2 Joc. cit. In this respect other translators agree. 

3 op. cit., S. 83, Anmerk. Cf. Hommel, Art. Babylonia in Hastings’ Dict. of 
the Bible. A. Jeremias, /edubar-Nimrod, S. 46., Anm. 16, notes that Eabani is 
called ‘man of Ninib,’ z.e. peasant or man of fields. 

4 Babylonian Religion, p. 113. 

> A work on this subject has been announced as forthcoming by Prof. Jastrow. 

The fact that the Eabani legend testifies to the actual existence, in remotely 
ancient Semitic folk-lore, of conceptions and associations of ideas which have been 
supposed on independent evidence (see next chapter) to lie at the root of the 


original legend which was developed by subsequent reflection into the Fall-story, 
is very noteworthy, whatever criticisms some of the coincidences in detail, asserted 


Ι 


11] Relations of the Fall-story 43 


From these descriptions of man’s origin and primitive state, 
and possibly, also, of his enticement from animal to civilised 
life, we turn to examine such other Babylonian parallels as 
have been adduced to the story of the Eall itself. The 
attempt to connect the serpent of Gen. iii. with Tiamat, the 
female personification of the primaeval watery waste, so 
prominent in some of the Babylonian creation-myths, and 
generally represented in the form of a dragon, may very 
safely be neglected, and indeed is now generally abandoned. 
Except that Tiamat was called ‘the enemy of the gods’ and 
was overcome by Marduk, she has nothing in common with 
the tempter in the Paradise-story. It is true the Babylonian 
dragon or serpent was also called ‘serpent of darkness’ and 
‘wicked serpent}, but it is extremely improbable that the 
tempter of Genesis was originally intended to be pre-eminently 
an evil power; the narrative rather suggests that, if he were 
ever more than a demoniac animal or kind of jz, he was a 
power beneficent to man. Tiamat, however, is a being which 
we can hardly suppose to be the original, however remote, of 
the subtly persuasive figure of Genesis; she was a terrible 
monster, and reappears in the Old Testament writings as 
Rahab and Leviathan, the principle of chaos, the enemy of 
God and man’. 


by Prof. Jastrow, may require. Of course there is much in the Fall-story, even 
after its ‘ prophetic’ teaching has been removed from it, which finds no parallel 
in the Eabani legend. The suppression of the serpent, to which Jastrow is led in 
order to establish closer identity, seems to us arbitrary ; especially since reading 
Barton’s instructive treatment of the subject, which, by the way, absorbs and 
agrees with, as well as supplements, the knowledge, if it be wholly ATES 
brought to light by Jastrow’s interesting investigation. 

It may be mentioned that a work has recently been published by Deere 
entitled Das Gilgamis-Epos tn seiner Bedeutung fiir Bibel und Babel; the writer 
has not had access to it. 

1 Sayce, Chald. Account of Genesis. 

2 Gunkel, Schipfung u. Chaos, 8. 383, considers Tiamat, however, to be the 
original of the ‘old serpent’ of Rev. xii. 9, a conception resulting from the blending 
of the old chaos-serpent (so frequently alluded to in the later books of the O.T.) 
after its meaning had become forgotten, with the serpent of Gen. iii., which is 
quite a different conception. This view is supported by the presence of other 
Babylonian imagery in the context, else other alternatives would be deserving of 
attention. Thus, Pherecydes of Syros is said by Eusebius (Praep. Ev. I. x.) to 
have derived his ‘old Ophion’ from Phoenician mythology; post-exilic Jewish 
Satanology and doctrine of fallen angels, or Zoroastrian influence, would also 
supply an explanation of the expression. 


44 Lhe Ethnological Origin and [| CHAP. 


There is more justification for the view which sees in the 
Babylonian god Ea the possible original of the tempter. Ea 
was god of the waters under the earth; and as they were 
regarded as the source of wisdom, he came also to be the god. 
of culture and knowledge. He is the Oannes of Berosus, who 
rose out of the Persian Gulf and taught men the beginnings 
of civilisation: the ‘intelligent fish,’ the ‘lord of under- 
standing. We find him represented as especially the god of 
humanity, always beneficent towards man, whom he befriends, 
as, for instance, during the deluge, against Bel. His name 
has been supposed to be connected with the Arabic Zayya?, 
and he is naturally easy to associate with the three figures of 
the serpent, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge’. 

This association is still further confirmed when we learn 
that Ea is called “the god of life,”*and is represented as 
applying the fertilising male cone of the palm to the palm 
tree‘. There was a sacred tree, presumably of this kind, at 
Eridu®; and Eridu was Ea’s city. As Barton has suggested, 
the artificial cultivation of the date-palm, which seems to be 
associated with the earliest Semitic civilisation, may have 
been brought by the colonists of Babylonia to Eridu, and in 
consequence of the connexion of this tree with Semitic 
agricultural progress on the one hand, and with Ea as god of 
life on the cther, wisdom and culture came also to be ascribed 
to this deity. 

But, as in the case of other details of the Fall-story, the 
serpent probably supplies us, not with a case of direct 
borrowing, whether of Tiamat or of Ea, but with a natural 


1 Cf. Sir H. Rawlinson, Herodotus, ed. 1, 1. p. 600, where the suggestion was 
perhaps first made. Lenormant (of. cé¢., I. p. ro6n.) and Gunkel (Gevests, S. 34) 
seem favourably inclined to this view, which is also widely accepted by writers on 
mythology. 

2 See above, p. 26, n. 2. 

3 For these assertions see, besides Rawlinson, Jastrow, of. czt., and de la 
Saussaye, Sczence of Religion, E.T. p. 484. Cf. also Maspero, Dawz of Civilisa- 
tion, 3rd ed., p. 546. 

4 Barton, of. ctt., refers to Lenormant (of. c7¢., 1. 232) on this point, and to 
an unpublished cylinder in the Brit. Museum alluded to by Prof. Sayce in his 
Fiibbert Lectures, p. 133. 

5 See above, p. 38. Pinches, 7he O. Testament in the light of the hist. records 
of Assyria etc., pp. 72 ff., gives reasons for believing the tree compared to ‘ white 
lapis’ to have been the vine. 


II | Relations of the Falt-story 45 


Hebrew or Canaanitish development of a root-conception 
common to many mythologies. The facts stated above, - 
p. 28 f., are perhaps more to the point than these instances 
of similar conceptions and combinations of ideas in kindred 
but foreign folk-lore. 

The only Babylonian writing in which we have evidence 
of Ea’s performing a definite act for mankind analogous to 
that ascribed in the present form of the Paradise-narrative 
to the serpent (though possibly the vé/ of the tempter was 
very different originally, as will presently be seen) is the 
Adapa legend’; and in this story he is the creator of man 
and also, indirectly, the means by which Adapa is prevented 
from obtaining immortality. This purpose he effects, too, by 
a deception ; but it is of a kind the converse of that of the 
Hebrew serpent-tempter, and somewhat resembles the 
deception contained in the threat attributed to Jahveh in 
Genesis, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely 
die*”” Adapa is handed over by Ea, for punishment, to Anu 
and other gods. He is warned by Ea to refuse, on entering 
into their presence, the ‘food of life’ and ‘water of life’ which 
will be offered him. Adapa is thus allowed entrance into 
heaven, and is consequently permitted by Ea to obtain the 
knowledge of the ‘secrets of heaven and earth,’ which it is not 
ordinarily permitted to mortals to behold. Anu and the 
gods then agree to confer immortality upon him, and the food 
and water of life are accordingly offered to him. They are 
refused, as Ea advised ; and, thus deceived, Adapa forfeits the 
virtues which they would have conveyed. 


1 This comes from Tel-el-Amarna and is therefore, in the written form, as 
early as the 15th cent. B.c. The legend embodies a tradition somewhat similar 
in nature to that of Eabani incorporated in the Gilgamesh epic. Adapa is called the 
‘seed of mankind ’ (Hommel), and is a representative mortal man. For the best 
statement, perhaps, of the relation of this story to that of Gen. iii., see Zimmern in 
Der Alte Orient, 2*** Jahrg. S. gi ff. Prof. Sayce’s identification of Adapa with 
Adama has not met with general acceptance. 

2 See also Jastrow’s comments on this story, of. cit., p. 550ff., where an 
English rendering of Zimmern’s German translation (for which, in turn, see 
appendix to Gunkel’s Schdpfung τε. Chaos) will also be found. 

In many respects the Babylonian Ea is the parallel of Jahveh in the Fall-story, 
rather than of the serpent. If the original story related to the conferring, by 
means of the tree of knowledge, of a gift on mankind which was not the object 
of divine prohibition (see next chapter), the parallel would be very much stronger. 


46 The Ethnological Origin and (CHAP. 


This is obviously no Fall-story, but it contains much that 
unquestionably resembles certain details in the Jahvist 
representation of the relations between Adam and God. The 
legend is concerned with man’s possibility of acquiring 
immortality and likeness to the gods, one of the root ideas 
underlying the Bible story of Paradise in its present form. 
It is not an exact parallel: the knowledge which Adam 
sought in opposition to Jahveh’s will was freely granted to 
Adapa, though in the case of both stories immortality was 
lost through deception by a supernatural being. 

Important conceptions are common to the two narratives ; 
the divergence lies in the fact that they are differently 
combined. Of course the mode in which Hebrew writers used 
Babylonian material in other cases prepares one not to 
expect a complete appropriation of the qualities and deeds of 
one individual, such as Ea’in the present instance, and the 
attribution of them in totality to the character or action of the 
corresponding person, such as either Jahveh or the serpent- 
tempter'. Nor does the Jahvist writer devote his borrowed 
material to a purpose corresponding to that which it served 
in its original setting. His Abel-story, for instance, is 
supposed to deal with the sons of the first man; yet it pre- 
supposes a populated world, and therefore originally served a 
purpose altogether different from that to which he puts :", 
The same kind of thing has been done with the Eabani and 
Adapa legends if they have really contributed any of the 
conceptions met with in the biblical account of Adam. 

Another point of detail in which some writers have seen a 
resemblance to Gen. iii. is the statement that Ea, when 
warning Adapa against the acceptance of the food of the 
gods, tells him to receive the garment they will offer. This 
has been compared to Jahveh’s gift of the coats of skins to 
Adam and Eve on their attaining to forbidden knowledge. 
It is, however, precarious to attach much significance to this 
coincidence; it is probably one of ‘letter’ only, and entirely 
superficial. 


1 Thus Parnapishtim in the Gilgamesh epic has traits in common with Adam, 
Noah, Enoch and (according to one authority) Lot: Gilgamesh is believed to 
have suggested both Nimrod and Samson. 


11 | Relations of the Fall-story 47 


It would seem that in the Babylonian traditions so far 
referred to it is immortality rather than knowledge that is 
mankind’s great quest, and which is forbidden by the gods. 
Knowledge, in several myths, seems to be freely given rather 
than grudged; its acquisition by man was not associated, so 
far as our fragmentary knowledge of Babylonian literature 
goes, with any undue self-exaltation or any fall. There is one 
legend, however, that of Zu the storm-bird god, in which Prof. 
Sayce sees a meaning very closely akin to that of Prometheus, 
and therefore the implication that knowledge was brought to 
mankind against the will of the gods. A tablet exists which 
yields part of a story of a being Zu who desires to be Bel 
and, dreaming that he is the father of the gods, protector of 
heaven and earth, steals the tablets of destiny with which he 
flees away. He is proclaimed an outcast, and Anu is urged 
to pursue him. There is nothing in this story to imply that 
Zu committed the theft for the benefit of mankind; but 
another inscription tells of the flight to the mountains of a 
god Lugal-turda, who was transformed into the likeness of a 
bird. This Zu-bird is the deified storm-cloud, and originally, 
Prof. Sayce believes, was an Accadian totem conception which 
passed into a god in the Semitic period. Zu was the pre- 
siding deity of the town of Marad and was worshipped 
throughout Babylonia. From these facts it is inferred that 
Zu was regarded as the bringer of the lightning from the gods 
to men, giving them the knowledge of fire and the power of 
reading the future in the flashes of the storm: that, in fact, he 
stole the secret wisdom and communicated it to man, and 
was therefore doomed to suffer’. The coincidences between 
these combined legends and that of Prometheus, if it be 
granted that the latter is a development into legend of a 
lightning-myth’, are certainly striking and suggestive of the 
inferences which Prof. Sayce has drawn. Still it is obvious 
that certain links in the chain of evidence that Zu is the 
equivalent of Prometheus are supplied rather by assuming 
the analogy which it is sought to prove than by necessary 


1 Sayce, Chald. Account of Genesis, chap. vii.; Hibbert Lectures, p. 295 ff. 
2 As is so ingeniously maintained by Kuhn in his essay Die Herabkunft des 
Feuers und des Gottertranks. 


48 Lhe £:thnological Origin and [(ΗΑΡ. 


implications of the statements of the Babylonian texts. That 
Zu was worshipped by men, for instance, is no proof that he 
stole the tablets on man’s behalf. For our purpose, however, 
it is sufficient to remark that the legend affords no parallel to 
the Fall-story except in the implication that the gods resented 
man’s acquisition of divine knowledge; and this, as has been 
said, is the most doubtful feature in the interpretation of it 
just examined. 

The Etana legend has sometimes been appealed to as 
evidence that ideas similar to those taught by the Paradise- 
story were common to Babylon. Etana, a hero who desires 
to obtain something which will mitigate the pains of parturt- 
tion for his wife, is tempted by the eagle to ascend with him 
to the heavenly regions. Both of them are cast down to the 
lower world, apparently as a punishment for presumption, and 
both subsequently encounter death. But Etana is not a 
representative of the human race; and if he were, the story 
would better illustrate that of the tower of Babel than that of 
the expulsion from Paradise. 

Other alleged analogies may be briefly discussed. The 
incident of the hero’s loss of the health-plant, in the Gilga- 
mesh legend, which was snatched from him by a serpent, can 
hardly be cited as a parallel to the loss of access to the tree 
of life in Gen. iii. It is introduced apparently as a mere 
accident. The supposed narrative of a fall, very similar in 
nature to that of Adam and Eve, through eating the ‘asnan 
fruit’ in the garden of the gods, contained in a mutilated 
Creation-tablet, proved, as is now well known, to be an 
account of a feast of the gods and not of a human fall’. The 
celebrated representation, upon a seal, of two figures seated 
near a tree, behind one of whom a serpent stands, certainly 
suggests at first sight the scene described in Gen. iii. But 
one of the figures is horned, and therefore, say some 
authorities, divine: it is impossible to say whether the figures 
are not of the same sex: the one is not handing the fruit to 


1 Boscawen’s translation appeared in the Babylonian and Oriental Record, 
1890, and is quoted in Ryle’s Zarly Narratives of Genests, p. 40. For the 
true rendering see Jastrow, op. cét., p. 424, or the translations of Delitzsch and 
Zimmern. 


Ir | Relations of the Fall-story 49 


the other, and they are both seated. The meaning of the 
picture is therefore possibly something totally different from 
that which was at first supposed?. The serpent, moreover, 
was a symbol of very varied signification in Babylon. 

It may be safely concluded, then, that we possess no 
Babylonian parallel to the Hebrew Fall-story?» That indi- 
vidual conceptions embodied in it, such as that of the divine 
resentment of human encroachments, or of a garden of the 
gods, or of a tree of life’, are common to Babylonian religion, 
is of course as true as it is natural; but such ideas were the 
common property of most ancient nations. The evidence is 
strong that the account of Paradise contained in Gen. ii. is 
partly derived from Babylonian material, and that the basis 
of the story had much in common with the Eabani legend, 
which, from its antiquity, is perhaps rather to be considered 
as Semitic than exclusively Babylonian. Here, however, the 
proof of interdependence ends. There is no parallel, as yet, 
in Babylonian literature, to the didactic element of our 
narrative which constitutes it essentially a Fall-story. It is 
sometimes urged that the sense of sin and of need for forgive- 
ness evinced by the Babylonians almost demands the exist- 
ence among them of a tradition of a Fall*. To this it may 


1 There are similar seal-representations in which, though some of the features 
of that above described are reproduced, there is no reason to suspect any allusion 
to the Fall. See Schrader, of. czt., i. 38; this writer’s opinion is shared by 
Baudissin and most authorities. 

F. Delitzsch, ina recent pamphlet, Babel und Bibel, S. 37, still adheres to the 
opinion that the seal mentioned above represents the Fall-story. Prof. E. Konig’s 
pamphlet, Δ εἰ und Babel, one of a number evoked by Delitzsch’s essay, maintains 
the more usual negative or sceptical attitude. Konig (S. 23, 24) sums up expert 
opinion when he says: ‘‘ Eine Erzahlung iiber die erste Verletzung menschlicher 
Pietat—also eine Parallele zu Gen. iii., 1 ff.—ist bis jetzt in der Keilschriftliteratur 
nicht gefunden worden.” 

2 See Additions and Corrections at the end of this volume. 

3 We read of a ‘plant of life’ in the legend of Gilgamesh, ‘ food of life’ and 
‘drink of life’ in that of Adapa, and a ‘plant of birth’ in that of Etana; also of 
the sacred tree, apparently a ‘world-tree’ like Ygdrasil, and an oracle-tree, at 
Eridu. The cedar, used for healing and also for soothsaying, and the date, 
used for wine, were sacred with the Babylonians. See Sayce, Hrbdert Lectures, 
p- 240 ff. ; Lenormant, of. cit., etc. 

+ Hommel, Art. Babylonia in Hastings’ Dict. of the Bible; F. Delitzsch, Wo 
lag das Paradies? S. 45. 


T. 4 


50 Lhe Ethnological Origin and [ CHAP. 


be replied that an intense feeling of personal sin can exist 
apart from any doctrine of a Fall, and that the penitence 
expressed in the Babylonian psalms does not so much be- 
speak an abiding consciousness of inherent sinfulness as the 
occasional conviction that sin was the necessary reason or 
cause for a particular personal calamity or divine visitation. 
The penitential psalms of Babylonia contain no allusion to 
such conceptions as are involved in a developed doctrine of a 
fall of the race, and the implication that human nature is 
corrupted. Moreover the sense of sin which they reveal is 
much less inward than that of the Hebrew psalmist. 

Further, it is to be noticed that the cuneiform literature 
has as yet supplied no trace of a Babylonian belief in a 
golden age. It cannot of course be concluded that no such 
tradition existed, as our records of Babylonian beliefs are but 
fragmentary; indeed it is almost incredible that the Baby- 
lonians did not possess such a legend!, But the fact that no 
such tradition has come down to us is noteworthy in con- 

. nexion with the similar absence of a Fall-story. 

In so far as negative evidence can aid in the establishment 
of any positive conclusion, we may say that the absence in 
Babylonian literature of a Fall-story in the strict sense, that 
is to say of a legend accounting not so much for the loss of 
Paradise, or for the association of troubles with civilisation, as 
for the introduction of sin into the world, tends to confirm 
the opinion that the Paradise-story did not become a Fall- 
story, even to the limited extent to which it is to be regarded 

yee one at all*%, until it was remodelled by the Hebrew people, 
and perhaps mainly by the Jahvist compiler, in the interests 
of the theology, and in relation to the sin-consciousness, of 
an age bordering upon that of literary prophecy. Babylonia, 


1 There is evidence that the ancient Babylonians observed the feast of Sacaea; 
see Athenaeus, Deip. XIV. 639 C., and Records of the Past, new series, 11. pp. 83, 
84, references which have been very kindly furnished by Prof. Sayce. Now 
Frazer (Golden Bough, 2nd ed, II. 150) connects the Sacaea with the Saturnalia, 
which in turn is said to have been popularly based elsewhere on the tradition of 
a golden age (p. 138). It is not proved, however, that such festivals grew out of 
that tradition, nor, therefore, that the Sacaea necessarily implies the belief, in 
Babylonia, in a golden age. 

% See above, p. 12. 


Π| Relations of the Falt-story 51 


however, already throws abundance of light on the ideas, and 
the vestiges of earlier associations, which are embodied in the 
picturesque details of the narrative. It was probably on 
Babylonian soil that an animistic and crude legend, whose 
earliest implications were similar to some of those which 
Jastrow and others have discovered in the story of Eabani}, 
developed into a culture-legend, Semitic in imagery, but akin 
to Aryan speculation from a similar level of civilisation in its 
ethos; a legend which, after modification at the hands of the 
Canaanites who had obtained it from Babylonia, was taken 
up by the Hebrews, and made the vehicle of ideas about 
Jahveh and the beginnings of human culture, and subsidiarily, 
though of set purpose, of teaching as to the entrance into the 
world of human sin. 


Greek Parallels. 


It is a remarkable fact that the most striking parallel 
which can be found to the teaching of the Hebrew Fail-story 
as a whole, if the exegesis of it here adopted be correct, is 
derived from an Aryan source. This, however, may merely 
be due to the imperfection of the Semitic record; or, with 
greater probability, to similarity of thought and feeling be- 
tween the Jahvist compiler and the Greek people with regard 
to the relation of the Deity to human culture. Extant 
Semitic traditions serve, as we have seen, to throw consider- 
able light on the origin, and the development in meaning, of 
the imagery with which the history of the Fall is clothed. 
Indeed we may regard its figures and underlying conceptions, 
for the most part, as common property, in some form, of 
several Semitic nations. But such sources fail to supply us 
with any explanation of some of the ruling ideas, or the 
ethos, of the narrative, which certain writers have believed to 
be foreign to the Hebrew mind. 

It is the myths of ancient Greece which reveal with least 
uncertainty a vein of thought similar to that disclosed by the 

1 Such crude legendary elements may perhaps go back to the age in which 
Semites and Hamites had a common home. The facts stated above, p. 36, on the 


authority of Prof. W. Max Miiller of Philadelphia, point to this conclusion, and are 
confirmed by the work of Prof. Barton to which reference has been made. 


4—2 


52 The Ethnological Origin and |CHAP. 


exegesis of the Fall-story of Genesis which was maintained 
in ChapterI. Allowing for the difference between the Hebrew 
conception of God’s nature and disposition towards man and 
that of Greek thought even as represented in Aeschylus, there 
is a great similarity between the teaching of the legend of 
Prometheus and that of the acquisition of knowledge through 
the eating of the forbidden fruit. Both contain the idea that 
the ills of human life are a punishment for man’s overstepping 
the limits of the sphere assigned to him: both regard human 
knowledge and culture as something requiring to be wrenched 
from a deity jealous of human encroachments, and whose 
acquisition was mediated by a superhuman being: both 
imply that human inventiveness or desire for material ad- 
vancement can scarcely be distinguished from arrogant 
independence or defiance, and see in ὕβρις the primal sin’. 

The story of Prometheus as the fire-stealer, which 1s con- 
sidered by some to be more ancient than that of his deception 
of Zeus in the matter of the sacrifice, though not embodying 
the original γ᾽ of Prometheus’, is closely associated in 
Hesiod with the once independent legend of Pandora. This 
latter story agrees with Genesis in making woman, or feminine 
curiosity, mediately the source of human evils*. Pandora is 

1 The same moral is perhaps taught by the fable of the Aloades; see Preller, 
Griech. Mythologie, 4*° Aufl. 5. 103. 

The Prometheus myth, or myths, for it appears to be a fusion of different 
stories of different date, is to be found in its popular form in Hesiod, Works and 
Days, 40ff.; Zheog. 506 ff. The attitude of Aeschylus towards the legend is 
impossible to determine with certainty as we have but the middle third of his 
trilogy. If the last part contained a vindication of Zeus, as is probable, he 
would have done for the old folk-story, to some extent, what the Jahvist writer 
or his predecessors did for the original myth which they Hebraised. 

2 Preller, of. czt., S. 95 ff. 

This view is of course opposed to the ingenious philological speculations of 
Kuhn (A/ythol. Studien, Bd. 1.). 

3 It is interesting to note that two features of the Hebrew Fall-story 
common to Greek mythology, viz. the agency of woman in the cause of evil and 
the acquisition οὗ. knowledge as the means of temptation to it, appear also in 
the legend of the Sirens. When these address Odysseus they sing: ‘‘ For none 
hath ever driven by this way in his black ship, till he hath heard from our lips 
the voice sweet as the honeycomb, and hath had joy thereof and gone on his way 
the wiser. For lo, we know all things, all the travail that in wide Troy-land 


the Argives and Trojans bare by the gods’ designs, yea and we snow all that 
shall hereafter be upon the fruitful earth.” Odyssey, X11. 184 ff. 


ΤῊΝ Relations of the Falt-story 53 


a Greek Eve, and her story, before being used for didactic 
purposes, implied that the first woman, unlike men who were 
generally regarded as autochthonous, was the handiwork of 
the gods. Her latér creation forms another parallel with the 
Jahvist history’. 

The Prometheus-legend was never used to account for the 
loss of the golden age; indeed Aeschylus makes the state of 
man, previous to his benefactor’s intervention, to have been 
almost bestial. But we find in Hesiod a tradition of the 
golden age of Kronos which has certain features in common 
with the history of the first man in Genesis, and which have 
been considered to have had a similar, but independent, origin. 

It remains to mention that in the garden of the Hesperides 
we have a picture of a home of the gods where Earth produced 
her choicest gifts and which contained a tree analogous to the 
tree of life. The tree was committed to the guardianship of 
a dragon, and its fruit was stolen by Herakles. This story is 
undoubtedly at bottom a solar myth depicting the conquest 
of the night by day, but which became in course of time 
complicated with accretions and fraught with new associations. 
Whether it has anything in common with the Paradise-story 
other than its conception of the garden of the gods and its 
tree bearing golden apples, is extremely improbable. Ladon, 
the guardian of the fruit, has quite a different function from 
that of the serpent-tempter who gives it away; and Herakles 
has no counterpart in the Hebrew narrative. It is too often 
imagined that every mythological combination of a tree and 
a serpent implies a kindred legend to that which forms the 
basis of the history of Adam and Eve. In the present 
instance the connexion was maintained by so high an autho- 
rity as Lenormant, who asserts, moreover, that the myth is 
indisputably of Phoenician origin®. According to this writer, 
the story of Herakles and Ladon would be practically another 
Prometheus-legend, and one wearing much of the outward 


1 Cf. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, E.T. 1. 37: ‘‘Once more we are astounded 
at the similarity of mythical invention obtaining among the most diverse peoples, 
and one almost involuntarily recalls the allied Hebraic story of Eve—the mother 
of all life—and the ominous consequences of her sinful curiosity.” 

2 op. cit., 1. Pp. 94, 95 N. 


54 The Ethnological Origin and [(ΗΑΡ. 


form of the Fall-story. The really essential features of the 
latter history seem, however, to be wholly wanting from the 
Hesperides legend, and the resemblances, with the exception 
of the scenery, to be entirely outward, superficial and inci- 
dental’. 

Such similarities of thought as have been mentioned 
between the Jahvist Fall-story and the myths of Greece 
require, of course, some explanation. That possibilities for 
early interchange of legendary traditions, through the medium 
of Phoenicia, between Canaan and Greece existed, we have 
already stated. But that Greek influences actually penetrated 
to the Southern Kingdom, whence the Jahvist document is 
now generally supposed to have been produced, is a theory 
improbable in itself, and one to which we are by no means 
compelled to resort for an explanation of the facts before us. 
We have seen reason, and shall soon find further reasons, for 
believing that the present ez/os of the Bible narrative of the 
fall of Adam and Eve was impressed upon ancient Semitic 
traditions possessing an altogether different meaning, and was 
the creation of Hebrew religious thought if not of the Jahvist 
compiler. And it may easily be the case that similar ideas 
about the origin of human evils, and the attitude of Deity to 
human self-advancement in its non-religious aspect, occurred 
to minds as different in character as those of Greek and 
Hebrew, when thinking on the same subject-matter from 
somewhat similar planes of culture and ethical reflection. 
The ‘ psychological unity’ of man, in the same circumstances, 
is obviously in this case an available, a natural, and a suff- 
cient, explanation of the phenomena. 


Iranian Parallels. 


In the oldest portion of the Avesta, the Gathas, written in 
archaic Iranian resembling the Vedic Sanskrit, we find a 
reference to a being named Yima, who is identical with 
Yama of the Vedas, and belongs to the ‘undivided Aryan’ 


1 Even the meaning of the golden apples has been variously interpreted ; 
see, ¢.g., Art. Hesperides in Encycl. Brit., and Cox, Aryan Mythylogy, 11. 10, 38. 


Π| Relations of the Fall-story 55 


period before Indians and Iranians were separate peoples’. 
It is doubtful whether in that period Yima or Yama denoted 
ἘΠΕ ΠΗ ticmuismeduledaun: the “Avesta «the son of 
Vivanghat’ (Vedic, Vivasvant), whom some’ consider to have 
then played that ré/e*, and also receives the epithet ‘shining, 
which confirms the supposition that he was a mythical solar 
hero before he came to be an earthly king*. In the Vendidad! 
and other portions of the Avesta later than the Gathas, Yima 
is certainly not the first man, but rather a first king and 
promoter of civilisation, whose reign was a kind of golden age 
in which there was ‘no envy made by the daevas®, no disease 
nor death, and man and flocks increased so that the earth 
had to be made larger®. He is also the Noah of a story which 
cannot be called a deluge-legend, but which is closely akin to 
one’, This Yima, however, fell into sin. He possessed the 
‘glory, we read, till his ‘lie, when he began to delight in 
falsehood’, The nature of his lie is not stated, but Firdtsi 
(10th century) says that he pretended to be a god. The more 
ancient passage of the Avesta, to which allusion has already 
been made, is also generally supposed to contain a reference 
to a fall of Yima such as would be connected with the 
introduction of flesh-eating. But the passage is one as to the 
translation of which oriental scholars do not agree, and which, 
in the judgment of Tiele, contains no such implication®. 


1 See Spiegel, ZLran. Alterthumskunde, 1. 439; Windischmann, Zoroast. 
Studien, S. 20. The passage in question is Yasna xxxii. 7-8. 

* Oldenberg, Religion des Veda, S. 275. In the Avesta Vivanghat is the first 
mortal who prepared the haoma, and in the Vedas the first sacrificer, to whom 
fire was brought from heaven by Agni. Lenormant, of. cé¢., 1. 68 and Darmesteter, 
Ormusd et Ahriman, p. 74, consider that Yima stood at first for the first man. 

3 Sacred Books of the East (henceforth denoted S. 2. Z.), Xxull. 60. These 
translations have been generally used here. 

4 Fargard 11. 

5 Yasna 1X.; Yast xv. 

§ Old age and death are represented as reigning before Yima’s time, Yas? Ix. 

“ Darmesteter, Spiegel, Kohut and other authorities believe this story to be 
due to Chaldaean or Hebrew influence. 

Sreriast XIX 34's cl, (Yast Vy 25-31: 

® A translation furnished by the Rev. J. H. Moulton, to whom the author 
is greatly indebted for generous aid in supplying some facts relative to Iranian 
literature, interprets Vasva ΧΧΧΙΙ. 8 thus: “ΟΥ̓ these sinners Yima the son of 
Vivanghat was famed to be, who, wishing to please our people, devoured cow’s 


56 The Ethnological Origin and [{ CHAP. 


If the opinion of the majority be adopted, and this passage 
be allowed to associate Yima with a fall from a primitive state 
of vegetarianism to one of flesh-eating, the whole of what we 
are told of him does not supply a story which can be at all 
compared with that of Gen. iii. Yima is not tempted to evil 
by the ‘fiendish serpent, Azhi Dahaka}, but only falls under 
his power after he has sinned. There is surely no need 


flesh.” Spiegel renders the verse: ‘‘Zu diesen Bésen sprach Yima der Sohn ‘ies 

‘ivanghat, der uns Menschen gelehrt hat das Fleisch in Stiicken zu essen.” 
Tiele (Geschichte der Religion im Alterthum, Bd. 11., 1% Halfte, 5. go-gr) 
considers that the rendering ‘sinners’ in this passage is grammatically impossible, 
and construes the verse: ‘‘ Of this punishment had Vivanghat’s son Yima heard, who 
(therefore) taught men to give to us a share of the flesh, when themselves eating.” 
[Von dieser Strafe hatte V.’s Sohn Yima gehort, der (deshalb) die Menschen 
unterwies, selbst essend einen Teil des Fleisches uns (zu geben).] Spiegel states 
that he knows no myths according to which Yima taught men to eat flesh, but 
adds: ‘‘Doch wird demselben die: Einrichtung verschiedener Festlichkeiten 
zugeschrieben, mit welchen Gastmahler verbunden waren.” 

Ch. de Harlez translates the passage: ‘‘ C’est par ces chatiments qu’est connu 
Yima, le fils de Vivanhas, qui voulut enseigner aux mortels a manger des chairs 
dépecées” ; and he adds ‘‘II est difficile de ne pas voir ici une allusion ἃ la 
déchéance de Yima et a son supplice.” 

Darmesteter (Annales du Musée Guimet, Tome XXI. pp. 238-9) renders the 
passage: ‘‘Ces pécheurs avaient pourtant entendu Yima, fils de Vivanhat, qui 
enseigna aux hommes de nous donner une part de la viande quwils mangent.” 
He adds: “On serait tenté de traduire, ‘qui 7ouzt les hommes en nous donmant 
une part de la viande qu'il mange,’” and states this to represent the opinion 
of Dinkart. Darmesteter also remarks: ‘‘La paraphrase de Dinkart est trés 
obscure: elle semble indiquer qu’il ne faut pas gaspiller et jeter la viande, 
ni tuer inutilement, mais seulement pour son besoin et celui de ses serviteurs.” 

Mills (S. 2. 2. Xxx1.) gives the following translation: ‘‘Of these wretched 
beings Yima Vivangusha was famed to be; he who, desiring to content our men, 
was eating kine’s flesh in its pieces.” 

Dr E. W. West has very kindly furnished the author with a literal rendering 
of the Pahlavi version of the passage: ‘‘Of those demons, a malicious sinner 
heard Yima, him who was son of Vivanhas, by whom 22 was explained to men 
(thus): ‘He eats the meat of our people in portions (equally gree'y with the 
lapfuls and armfuls of mankind).’” The Pahlavi translator tries to explain the 
Avesta text as literally as possible, so far as his experience permits, and introduces 
several explanatory clauses in further illustration of his meaning. This version, 
says Dr West, was probably written A.D. 226-240, but afterwards revised about 
531-579. It may be considered as the best authority we have for the meaning of 
the Avesta text ; but the version as a whole is said to be by no means absolutely 
trustworthy. 

1 This is a mythical person corresponding to the Vedic Vritra, the storm-cloud 
snake. It would seem that the legend of Azhi and Yima grew out of a solar 
myth. Weber, Znd. Studien, 111. S. 416 ff. 


ΤῊ Relations of the Fall-story 57 


to speculate on the very remote possibility of the Hebrew 
story being suggested by this source or borrowed from it’ 

The mystic drink Haoma (Soma of the Vedas), corre- 
- sponding in properties to those of the tree of life, and perhaps 
also to those of the tree of knowledge’, need not be appealed 
to as the source of those conceptions in the biblical narrative 
after what has been said of corresponding, and still more 
closely analogous, figures in the more kindred Semitic 
traditions®. 

On passing from the Avesta to the Bundahesch, we find 
parallels to the early narratives of Genesis somewhat more 
suggestive of possible interdependence. The Bundahesch, 
however, was not written till about the 9th century A.D.; 
and though it largely drew from ancient tradition and 
embodied matter contained in lost Avestan writings, it was 
also enriched with comments after the manner of Jewish 
haggada, so that it is not always easy to discriminate with 
certainty its really ancient elements. Some of its legends 
are developments of ancient Iranian lore, but much new 
oral material accumulated during the Sassanian period; and 
before it was reduced to writing there was abundant oppor- 
tunity for intercourse between Persians and Jews‘. It would 

1 Horn considers the sin of Yima to be a late addition to his history and due 
to Hebrew influence. Spiegel, here as in other cases, believed in a Semitic origin 
(Zran. Alterthumskunde, 1. S. 446 ff.), as to the possibility of which other authorities 
agree. But there is no serious evidence of contact with Hebrew thought till 
a much later time than that of the composition of J. There appears to have been 
too great a readiness on the part of many scholars to assume that analogies, often 
distant and superficial, are necessarily due exclusively to direct influence of one 
nation on another. Before such a view can be safely adopted, the history and 
chronology involved, and the possible means of inter-communication, need to be 
much more minutely investigated than has usually been the case. 

2 The haoma was, like the soma (Aig Veda, X. 97. 17), king of healing plants. 
It ‘kept death away’ (5. B. £. XX11I. p. 20). It was supposed to give victory in 
battle ( Yas¢ xiv. 57), and ‘ brilliant offspring’ to women ( Yasva Ix. 22) ; and even 
to bestow wisdom and knowledge also (2éz/.). 

3 On traces of a tradition of a Paradise in the Avesta, with its trees, see 
Windischmann, of. cit. 

4 See Kohut, Jewish Quart. Review, 1. 231 ff. Cheyne, Art. De/wge in 
Encycl. Bibl., like Kohut and others, thinks the Persians borrowed from Hebrew 
traditions. This would seem to be prima facie as likely as the converse relation 


in the case of the narratives of P; in the case of those of J, whose antiquity is 
beyond question, it is infinitely more probable. On the other hand there are 


58 The Ethnological Origin and | CHAP. 


be extremely difficult, in case of actual borrowing, to decide 
on which side the debt lay; but perhaps too much has some- 
times been made of the alleged points of resemblance. In 
this relatively late work we read of a first man and woman, 
Maschya and Maschiana, who sprang from the seed of the 
dead Gayomard, a being who may be compared to the 
‘celestial Adam’ of the Talmud or the ‘generic man’ of 
Philo". The first truly human pair are said to have at first 
acknowledged Ormuzd as creator; then their minds became 
corrupted and they exclaimed that the earth had been made 
by Ahriman?, under whose power they passed. The story 
continues with an account of how they then began to use 
animal food, first milk and then the flesh of a sheep which 
they roasted ; how they clothed themselves in skins, fashioned 
implements, and made themselves a shelter. We are next 
told that they fought with one another. After 50 years they 
were ‘moved to desire’; they ate their first children and 


afterwards had others*. It is noticeable that we have here. 


the notion of a gradual fall of the first representatives of the 
human race closely associated, if not identified, with the 
transition to flesh-eating and progress in culture, and that the 
story has points in common with Gen. iil. and iv.4 But the 
stories, for all their points of resemblance, are widely different ; 
and if their general meaning may be the outcome of inde- 
pendent speculation on the same subject, the details may 
easily be coincidences, especially as they are not so closely 


strong reasons for believing that many of the legends connected with demons, the 
trees of Paradise, and Adam, which are met with in pseudepigraphical and Jewish 
literature, were in part borrowed from Persia and elsewhere. 

1 Firdtisi makes Gayomard, like Yima in the Avesta, a first king and teacher 
of civilisation. 

2 This false speech is said to have been uttered ‘through the will of the 
demons,’ S. B. #. V. p. 52. 

δ EWN. p. 52th. spiegel, op. Ἐς Lp. 508.7. ΟΠ aoe Δ 22} ΠΝ 

4 Lajard, Culte de Mithra, p. 50 ff., hints at the possibility of the borrowing of 
this story from Gen. The story does not occur in the Avesta, but Lajard (p. 60) 
asserts that it must have been originally included therein because allusions to it 
occur in the Yasts of Tir and Mithra. Lajard relies here on the translations of 
Anquetil du Perron (see his Zend-Avesta, Tome 11. p. 189 and p. 214); but in 
Darmesteter’s rendering (S. 8. &. XXIII. p. 96 and p. 132) the name Maschya 
vanishes and the sense is different. 


Π] Relations of the Fatll-story 59 


similar as to absolutely demand the hypothesis of borrowing. 
The Bundahesch also tells of Ahriman leaping to earth in 
the shape of a serpent to spoil the creatures of Ormuzd'. It 
speaks also of Al Burz as a kind of Eden with mystic rivers”. 
Its account of the dealings of Jem (Yima) with the demons, 
according to which he took a demon to wife and gave his 
sister to a demon, from which unions sprang apes and bears, 
seems to have certainly been derived from, or to have 
suggested, the extremely similar fancies met with in Jewish 
literature’. 


Indian Parallels. 


The Vedas yield no fall-story. Yama, ultimately identical 
with the Iranian Yima, is god of the underworld. Some, 
however, have seen in the story of the incest of Yama and 
his sister Yami, in the tenth book of the Rig Veda, the 
implication that these figures corresponded to Adam and 
Eve, Max Miiller regarded the story as a myth of the 
dawn. In any case there is no parallel here to the Hebrew 
Fall-story. 

Mention must be made of a story told in Hardwick’s 
Christ and other Masters’, and sometimes repeated by writers 
on the Fall-narrative as if it were a genuine parallel from 
Hindu tradition. The first man (Manu Swayambhuva) is 
identified with Brahma, who, thus humanised, is tempted by 
Siva. Siva drops from heaven a blossom of the sacred fig, 
which was “regarded as the tree of knowledge” (bodhidruma). 
Brahma thinks this will make him immortal; he gathers it 
and, intoxicated with this fancy, thinks himself divine. Then 
the god appears in majesty, curses him and banishes him 
from Brahmapattana to an abyss of degradation. It is added 
that Brahma’s ambitious hopes were instigated by his wife. 

The tree here spoken of is the well-known tree of Buddha, 
under which he received his enlightenment. The story is 
of very late date, and embodies no ancient Hindu tradition. 
Dus BOR. p. 17. This idea may be the source of the Jewish identification 


of Satan with the serpent of Gen. iii. 4 Op. Ctt., DP. 34- 
3 Spiegel, 1. 5. 527; cf. Eisenmenger, Avtdecktes Judenthum, i. 412 ff. 
+ See e.g. Phillips, Zhe Teaching of the Vedas. 


ΕΤ ΤΙ Ὁ: 135 0. (1555): 


60 Origin of the Fall-story [CHAP. II 


According to high authorities in oriental studies there is 
much in Hardwick’s work which, like this story, is of no 
value as an illustration of ancient Hindu thought. 

* * * * * * 


The general impression left upon the reader by a con- 
sideration of the details presented in the foregoing pages will 
probably be somewhat as follows: that the material is too 
scanty to enable us to reconstruct Israel’s religious state and 
legendary possessions, with any degree of completeness, pre- 
viously to the nation’s entrance into Canaan: that the 
elements of which the framework or imagery of the narrative 
of the first sin is composed belonged to the legendary lore 
more or less common to Semitic races generally: that the 
didactic import of the story as a whole was due to pre- 
prophetic or prophetic Hebrew thought, which treated its 
traditional material in some respects conservatively, in other 
respects with drastic rigour and unfettered licence: that our 
conclusions suffer in finality from our ignorance of Phoenician 
legend, which may possibly have been influenced by com- 
munication with ancient Greece!: that the parallels supplied 
by Aryan tradition are better explained, for the most part, 
by the hypothesis of independent though psychologically 
similar origin: that the possibilities of actual borrowing have 
probably often been unduly magnified: and that, in the 
present state of knowledge, it is impossible to form a conclu- 
sion as to the ethnological sources of the Fall-story to which 
finality can attach. The material at our disposal is also too 
fragmentary to be considered representative’. 

1 It is generally believed that the Phoenicians were rather receptive of external 
influences than apt to impress their thought,on other civilised nations. 

2 The more important literature on the subjects Wiscussed in this chapter has 
for the most part been referred to in the notes. The indispensable foundation is 
Lenormant’s Les Origines de ὦ histoire, which is very trustworthy for facts but is 
perhaps now somewhat old and contains some uncritical inferences. Dillmann’s 
New Commentary on Genesis, vol. 1. (E.T.), is also rich in facts and references. 
But the works of specialists in each branch of ancient literature must be compared, 
else the student will be led astray. 

Since the above chapter was written new works on Babylonian religion by 
Prof. Sayce and Τὶ G. Pinches have been announced. For information supplied 


by that of the latter author the reader has already been referred to Additions and 
Corrections at the end of this volume. 


ἕν ( eee 


pepe “ 


ΠΡ es 1ABe 


Pitas Y CHOLOGICALBORIGIN: OF THE FALL-STORY: 
ITS RELATION TO HISTORY, ALLEGORY AND MYTH. 


It has already been found necessary to allude to the 
legendary or, as they are usually called, mythological sub- 
strata which underlie the narrative of Gen. ii. and ili, and 
which reveal themselves in it in spite of their having been for 
the most part refined away in the interests of an increasingly 
ethical and monotheistic religion. External evidence is sup- 
plied by the Old Testament that such traditions concerning 
Paradise and the first man, more mythological in character, 
though not necessarily, for that reason, more ancient}, than 
that embodied in Genesis, were handed down at a considerably 
later date. , 

Thus in Job xv. 7 1" there is an obvious allusion to a 
legend that the first man was a kind of demigod, created 
before the hills, who had access to the council of God’ and 
acquired extraordinary knowledge of the mysteries of the 


1 This is Gunkel’s view, but it cannot be adopted unquestioningly ; for 
legendary allusions in post-exilic books may indicate late borrowing of Babylonian 
and other folk-lore, induced by closer contact with foreign influences. There is 
evidence of renewed interest in mythology after the exile. 

2 RV. 8 Art thou the first man that was born? Or wast thou brought forth 
before the hills? Dost thou hearken in the council of God? And dost thou 
restrain wisdom to thyself?” (‘didst thou steal wisdom for thyself?’ Hoffmann, 
Gunkel, etc.). See Delitzsch, Job, E.T. 1. 251 ff. Gunkel (Schopfung τε. Chaos, 
S. 148; Geres?s, S. 29 1.) assumes perhaps too confidently that we have in these 
last words a reference to the fall of Adam. 

Beh Leb XXL τς 


62 The Psychological Origin [ CHAP. 


world'. Some scholars translate the verb, rendered in our 
version ‘restrain, by ‘steal’; but this is a possible, rather 
than a necessary, rendering. If it could be adopted with 
certainty, we should possess in this passage a tradition having 
something in common with Gen. iii., and a strong confirmation 
of the view maintained above, after Wellhausen, that the sin 
which caused man’s expulsion from Paradise consisted in the 
illegitimate or forbidden acquisition of wisdom. The ethos 
of either story would then be very similar to that of the 
Prometheus legend. This view possesses great attractiveness ; 
but it must be admitted that the writer may have only in- 
tended to imply that the first man acquired his wonderful 
knowledge through his privilege of access to the council of 
God. In any case he knew of a legend which endowed the 
first man with semi-divine attributes: a feature which the 
Jahvist writer, if he was acquainted with it, did not admit 
into his history. It seems, however, unlikely that the legend 
which is used by the author of Job xv. had any con- 
nexion with the mythical material utilised by the writer of 
Gen. iii. The view that the first man was a being endowed 
with extraordinary privileges and excellences, the view repro- 
duced in Job and, as we shall presently see, in Ezekiel, would 
seem to belong to an altogether different cycle of legend from 
that which represented him, like the Jahvist narrative, as 
emerging from the natural, and perhaps almost animal, state 
and attaining toa knowledge and culture which were expressly 
denied him by his Maker. If the Adam of Genesis was con- 
ceived after the model of an Eabani, he had no identity with 
a figure resembling, in some respects, the personification of 
Wisdom and, in others, the most splendid of oriental monarchs. 
The latter kind of legend, too, would seem to represent a 
higher level of culture and a later mode of thought than that 
embodied in our Paradise-story, which was probably derived 
from very remote antiquity. Certainly it was this post-exilic 


1 Cf. the personified Wisdom of Prov. viii. 22 ff., esp. vv. 22, 25. Toy (Crit. 
Comm. on Prov. p. xxix), disagreeing with Ewald, Davidson and Budde, will allow 
no allusion in Job xv. 7 to the description of Wisdom contained in these verses. 
Budde (Handkommentarzum A.T., Hiob, 5. 77-8) sees only a reference to Wisdom, 
and none to a $ first man.’ 


11 | of the Fall-story 63 


representation of the first man, rather than that of the Jahvist 
narratives, which was chosen for elaboration in later Jewish 
literature, whether of the apocalyptic or the rabbinical class. 
Again, in Ezek. xxviii. we find what is undoubtedly an 
account of an expulsion from Eden applied in a figurative 
manner to the downfall of the king of Tyre. The legend of 
which use is here made possibly implies that the version of 
the story in Genesis is a recension of a fuller, richer and more 
mythological narration, in which.the garden of Eden was 
associated with a ‘mountain of God?’ The text .of the 
passage is unfortunately very corrupt, so that its exegesis 
is difficult ; and no confidence can be placed in conjectural 
attempts at its amendment. The king of Tyre is figuratively 
compared to a legendary being who lived in the garden of 
God, whose clothing was adorned with precious stones, and 
who, in consequence of proud self-exaltation, was expelled 
from the divine abode. The passage probably implies, further, 
that this being, like the prince who is compared or identified 
with him, was of preeminent physical beauty and wisdom. 
Whether he was the first man’, or an angel‘, or a ‘son of 
Elohim®, is not definitely stated in the context, but the first 
of these alternatives would seem to be the most probable*. 
There is therefore some doubt as to how far this legend used 
by Ezekiel is to be regarded as identical with that which 
underlies the Fall-story ; but the passage leaves no room for 


1 The later Jewish speculation on the first man certainly appears to have been 
largely directed by foreign influences. Amongst these, Persian legend probably 
played a considerable part. See Kohut on Parsic and Jewish legends of the first 
ig 7. Ὁ Δ. 111: 231: 

5. Such is Gunkel’s opinion. See his Οσεγερῖς for an account of Hebrew and 
Jewish conceptions of Paradise. On Ezek. xxviii. see the Commentaries, on that 
prophet, of Cornill (5. 360), Keil (E.T., in loc.), Bertholet; also Art. Cherud, 
Encycl. Bibl, 

In Ezek. xxxi. we find ‘the Assyrian’ compared to a tree envied by ‘‘all the 
trees of Eden, that were in the garden of God” for its surpassing excellence. 
The Eden of Ezekiel reminds us very forcibly of the Mountain of Masu in the 
Gilgamesh epic (A. Jeremias, /zdubar-Nimrod, S. 28-30), where was a tree 
bearing ‘ costly stones’ as its fruit. Cf. Ezek. xxviii. 14, τό. 

3 Keil, Gunkel, Kraetzschmar (Zzechiel, in Nowack’s Handkomm. zum A. vay 

4 Cornill. 5 Cheyne. 

6 The splendid clothing attributed to him may be the state-dress of one of the 
sons of Elohim (Cheyne), or, equally well, that which ancient tradition sometimes 
assigns to the first man; see the Targums on Gen. iil. 


64 The Psychological Origin [ CHAP. 


uncertainty as to the existence, in the prophet’s time, of oral 
tradition about Paradise and its guardian cherubim more 
mythological and, it may possibly be, more ancient than the 
Jahvist recension. ; 

With the witness supplied by these two Old Testament 
passages to the actual existence amongst the Hebrew tradi- 
tions either of ancient variants of the Paradise-story or of 
alternative stories, we may the more confidently examine the 
narrative more closely than was attempted in the preceding 
chapter for indications of the character which its material 
previously bore. 

We may begin with the idea of the garden of Eden. In 
the Jahvist history this is represented as the home of the first 
human beings, prepared for them by the benevolent care of 
God. Such an anthropocentric view of the garden is surely 
not primitive or original. It may well be one of the marks of 
the treatment which the more ancient conception of Paradise 
received at the hands of the generations represented by the 
Jahvist school, or of generations anterior to that time. It is 
the product of relatively well-developed Jahvism, and marks 
an advance in the direction of ethical monotheism upon the 
conception which it replaced. This earlier conception is not 
completely refined away in our narrative. Eden has evidently 
been the ‘home’ of Jahveh on earth, where He enjoys the cool 
of the evening ; its two trees, not to speak yet of their probable 
signification at a still earlier time, impart qualities which be- 
long of right only to Deity, and which, if analogy with Aryan 
mythology at a corresponding stage of development be 
relevant, may perhaps have been regarded as the food of 
Jahveh and the divine beings associated with Him, who are 
definitely referred to in Gen. iii. 22. In the variant of the 
story which is used in Ezek. xxviii. it is spoken of as the 
‘garden of God?’ and is associated with a ‘mountain of God” 


1 Cf. Gen. iv. 16, xiii, 10; Isai. li. 3; Ezek. xxxi. 8, etc. The references in 
the prophets to the garden of Eden (see also Ezek. xxxvi. 35; Joel ii. 3) show that 
this element of the Paradise-story was familiar in Hebrew tradition. The ex- 
pressions ‘ tree of life,’ ‘fountain of life,’ ‘water of life,’ occurring in Prov., Pss. 
etc., and the allusions in Ps. xlvi. 4, Isai. xiv. 13 (eschatological) are also based 
on_conceptions embodied in, if not derived from, this legend. 

2 See the commentaries of Dillmann and Gunkel. 


111 | of the Fatt-story 65 


The idea of a permanent earthly abode of the gods is common 
to (agricultural) Semitic and (relatively advanced) Aryan 
religions, and indeed is one which must inevitably arise in the 
development of religious thought. The transition from it to 
that of a Paradise for man and of a golden age is an easy 
step in mythological logic. The gods’ land supplied the 
colouring for an earthly Paradise’, just as the lost earthly 
Paradise supplied imagery for the Jewish and Christian 
descriptions of heaven. 

The psychological origin of the idea of ‘a golden age’ at 
the beginning of human history, common to so many peoples, 
is by no means difficult to explain. It is so universal a 
tendency of the individual to optimise his distant past that 
one can easily see the psychological necessity of such a 
conception of human history to man when he has arrived 
at a certain stage of reflective ‘thought and speculation ". 
Widening experience of life brings to most men more 
disappointments of hopes and prepossessions than un- 
expected joys; and, by a very natural transference, we are 
inclined to interpret our expanding knowledge of the evil 
of the world by concluding that the world is growing old. 
When middle age looks back regretfully at departed youth ; 
or when Rousseau urges a ‘return to Nature’ and the 
mediaevalist calls the times of darkest ignorance and 
superstition the ‘ages of faith,’ the same subjective psycho- 
logical process is involved as led half-civilised man to. dream 
of a simpler and happier world long before his time. And 
if it is knowledge which begets the consciousness of evil, 
widening experience which discloses more and more of life’s 
ills; above all, if the ever-growing acquisitions of ‘social 
heredity’ and the ever-increasing requirements of progressive 
civilisation impose more and more demands upon the 


1 See Usener, Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, Theil 3, S. 182 ff. 

2 Cf. W. R. Smith, Rel. of Semites, 1894, p. 303: The idea of a golden age ‘‘is 
the natural result of psychological laws which apply equally to the memory of 
individuals and the memory of nations’’; and Maspero, Zhe Dawn of Civilisation, 
S. P. C. K. 3rd ed. p. 160: “1 is an illusion common to all peoples ; as their 
insatiable thirst for happiness is never assuaged by the present, they fall back 
upon the remotest past in search of an age when that supreme felicity which is 
only known to them as an ideal was actually enjoyed by their ancestors.” 


ΠΣ 5 


66 The Psychological Origin [ CHAP. 


individual will, and a greater break with the state of nature ; 
what is more natural than to conclude that acquisition of 
knowledge is responsible for increased capacity for human 
evils, and to deduce that some elements, at least, in human 
self-advancement were resented by the gods? It would be 
surprising indeed if no such legends as the Fall-story and its 
partial analogues had grown up in the infancy of philo- 
sophical speculation. That they are, in some form or other, 
as we have seen, so widely spread, requires no further 
explanation than that the conditions for their origin have 
been everywhere the same. It was as true in early ages as 
it is to-day that “he who increaseth knowledge increaseth 
sorrow.” 

The two trees of the garden are obviously still looked 
upon by the writer of Gen. 11. and ili. as having acted in a 
magical way and as endowed with divine energies. They 
impart their virtues when their fruit is eaten’. It has already 
been seen that similar legendary conceptions are to be found 
throughout ancient Aryan and Semitic mythologies; and 
perhaps light may be thrown upon their origin and their 
most primitive meaning by an examination of the folk-lore of 
races which have retained in tradition the myths which 
belonged to them when in a state of religious and intellectual 
infancy. Indeed a large amount of evidence has been 
collected, though it needs to be subjected to rigorous criticism 
before one can venture to make use of it, to show that the 
root-idea associated with such magical trees is that of re- 
production of life. And there have not been wanting, from 
antiquity to the present time, those who have suspected such 
an implication to have been originally embodied in the Fall- 
story, before the idea of immortality or of progress in culture 
superseded it. Comparative mythology, of course, affords 
numerous instances of the transference of a symbol associated 
with one circle of ideas to quite another such circle, 
according to change of circumstances or advance in civilisa- 
tion and religious development. And if the story of Paradise, 


1 We find the same idea in the groundwork of the Sook of Enoch, dating 
probably from the 2nd century B.c. See below, Chap. VIII. 


Π1]| of the Fall-story 67 


as has been seen to be most probable, was derived from 
Phoenicia or Canaan, where phallic worship flourished and 
was closely associated, both in theory and practice, with 
agricultural life, it is by no means impossible that this story, 
even when first received thence by the Hebrew people, 
possessed a significance in some way connected with the ideas 
upon which phallic religion is based’. Some writers have 
seen in the selection of the use of clothing as the example of 
the application of the knowledge acquired through ‘the 
opening of the eyes, though apt enough in itself as an 
illustration of the beginnings of civilisation, a trace of such 
primitive meaning in the story; especially as this advance is 
expressly associated with the awakening of the feeling of 
shame. If the knowledge bestowed by the tree was originally 
identified with the consciousness of sex or the origin of 
passion, there is, it is argued, a natural reason for the choice 
of this particular example of the effects of partaking of the 
fruit of the tree of knowledge, and possibly for the presence 
in Gen. ili. of a verse which otherwise seems out of place*®. It 
is to be observed that, in a later period, literature which drew 
upon ancient legendary tradition, but which at the same time 
fancifully embellished it, hints at an interpretation of the 
story which would regard the first sin as connected with 
sexual desire*. Comparative mythology is also not un- 
favourable to this conjecture, which, moreover, would associate 
the original function of the tree of knowledge very closely 
with that of the tree of life, and harmonise with the sugges- 
tion, which has been advanced for more than one reason, and 
by students who have approached the subject from the point 
of view of diverse branches of study, that the one of these 


1 On the close connection which exists in the primitive human mind between 
the plant world and man as regards fertility and life-giving power, see Frazer, 
Golden Bough, 2nd ed. vol 11. pp. 204 ff. The association of Ishtar worship etc. 
with agricultural life seems to be based on this confusion. 

2 Gunkel offers the conjecture that Gen. iii. 20 (often thought to be an inter- 
polated fragment from a variant of the story), which implies that Eve had 
conceived before the expulsion from Eden, is derived from a source which regarded 
the tree of knowledge as having the significance alluded to above ; Geneszs, S. 23. 

3 See below, Chaps. viI-x. Cf. Jastrow’s derivation of the Paradise-story from 
the Eabani legend, mentioned in the preceding chapter. 


5---2 


68 The Psychological Origin [CHAP. 


trees is fundamentally a reduplication of the other. Trees 
were certainly symbolical, in Phoenicia, Arabia, and else- 
where, of the earth’s productiveness!, and had a close 
connexion with Ishtar-worship, which there is reason to 
believe to have been common to Semitic races generally. 
They are asserted to have frequently been phallic symbols of 
some kind or other, and Movers? states that this was the case 
in Phoenicia. This author's assertions with regard to 
phallicism have, many of them, been disputed ; and doubtless, 
like many other statements made by the numerous writers on 
folk-lore and ancient symbolism who read phallicism almost 
everywhere, and see in it “the key to all mythologies,” they 
require careful sifting. But there is growing empirical 
evidence, and also increasing volume of reasons deduced 
from the consideration of early man from the evolutionary 
point of view, for the belief that ideas connected with the 
phenomena of propagation in the organic world and in the 
human species largely moulded the early religious concep- 
tions of mankind at a certain stage of his mental develop- 
ment. : 

We have to distinguish, however, between the present 
purport and purpose of the Paradise-story, intended by the 
Jahvist compiler, and those of the various previous forms of 
the narrative, or of its component elements, which students of 
early human culture think they can partially trace. Increas- 
ing knowledge of the modes of thought of remote times, and 
of the immensely long development implied in such civilisa- 
tion and theology as existed in Israel in the prophetic age, 
has shown us how easy it is to commit great anachronisms 
when we endeavour to throw light on a myth or legend, 
coming to us from within the historical period, by means of 
conceptions culled from folk-lore without reference to the 
stage of development which such tradition represents. The 
problem of ascertaining the probable previous history of the 
conceptions underlying the story of the Fall has been 


1 W. R. Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 411. The haoma tree of the Avesta 
(see p. 57) and Bundahesch imparted health, generative power, immortality, and 
also wisdom, thus combining the qualities of the two trees of Gen. ii., iii. 

2 Die Phoenizter. 


IIT] of the Fall-story 69 


revealed to be one of infinitely greater complexity than was 
formerly: thought. Earlier methods of investigation have 
become obsolete; and earlier solutions were far too easy. 

It is an anachronism, for instance, to interpret the story of 
the Fall as embodying ideas of the class to which we have 
just alluded in connexion with it, except as fossils. The 
Jahvist writer certainly did not wish to teach that the first sin 
(a conception which he was perhaps the first to introdnce into 
the narrative, or which, at least, could not in his day be of any 
great antiquity) consisted in forbidden marriage-relations 
between Adam and Eve to which Eve was instigated by the 
serpent ; the tree of life, according to his usage, conveyed 
immortality, and the tree of knowledge an opening of the 
eyes to more than what is actually stated, inasmuch as he 
represents the acquired wisdom as dangerous to Jahveh. 
The connexion of these trees with the ideas of sex-knowledge 
was an association of thought belonging perhaps to his legen- 
dary material at an earlier period, and from which he intended 
to clear his narrative. This association was only read into 
the story again when his meaning had been lost, and the 
utter absence of capacity for historical exegesis made it 
impossible for commentators to recover it. Nor was Gen. iii. 
intended as a protest against current or previous Canaanitish 
phallic rites!; this would again imply that the story had no 
connexion with the problems of immortality and civilisation, 
and was of the nature of an allegory, whose homiletic purport 
was concealed with very unnecessary skill. 

A more scientific attempt to penetrate beyond what we 
may call the ninth century meaning and value of the Fall- 
story, by a study of the significance of sacred trees in 
primitive Semitic thought, will be found in the work of 
Prof. Barton to which reference has already been made* 


1 As is maintained by Cobb, Origines Fudaicae; cf. Donaldson, /ashar, 
pp- 41 ff.; Trumbull, 716 Threshold Covenant, p. 437 etc. Similarly Fergusson, 
Tree and Serpent Worship, 1873, p. 7, regards the story as polemic against an 
earlier Hebrew serpent worship. 

On the relation of Hebrew prophecy to Ashtoreth worship, see Barton, 
Fournal of Bibl. Uterature, X. 73 fi. 

2A sketch of Semitic Orizins; see esp. Chaps. ii., iii. 


70 Lhe Psychological Origin | CHAP. 


This writer starts from the fact that the date-palm was 
closely connected with earliest Semitic life and husbandry. 
It appears to have been much cultivated at an extremely 
ancient period ; and the fact that, for fruit-bearing, it requires 
a considerable amount of artificial aid in effecting its 
fertilisation, may be supposed to have led to its being looked 
upon as a reflex of man’s own primitive social life. This 
cultivation of the palm being also the means of his 
agricultural progress, the early Semite would be likely 
enough to attribute his knowledge to the tree; especially, 
on account of the fact previously mentioned, would he 
connect with it his knowledge of sex and procreation. This 
circumstance, together with the fact that at such a time 
sexual irregularity was prevalent amongst Semites, as indeed 
probably among mankind generally at a similar stage of 
development, would doubtless make a deep impression upon 
early religious ideas and practices. There is no doubt that, in 
the animistic and totemistic stage, man regarded trees as 
animate, as having perceptions and passions like himself. 
And, indeed, so deeply does this mode of thought influence 
many Savage races at the present day, that mutual sex- 
relations between the human race and the animal and 
vegetable kingdoms are believed in and acted upon*®, Thus 
Barton regards the date-palm, significant on account of its 
dioecious nature and its extensive usefulness and cultivation, 
as the prototype of the tree of knowledge. The tree of life 
he supposes to be a later conception, which only arose with 
the dawning desire for future life; but of course the concep- 
tion of trees of life or food of life existed before that of 
immortality. The tree of knowledge, however, would thus 
be identical with the sacred tree which figures largely in 
Babylonian religion. Its prohibition to man is to be regarded 
as introduced when the original meaning of the tree had been 
changed so as to suggest only the means by which man 
arrived at culture or practical wisdom, a process whose 


1 It is noteworthy that in the earliest Jewish interpretation of the tree of life 
that is extant, Zhe Book of Enoch, Chaps. xxiv., xxv., its fruit is said to resemble 
the dates of a palm. This may de a tradition of hoary antiquity. 

2 See the pages of Frazer’s The Golden Bough just referred to. 


111 | of the Fall-story 71 


successive stages are associated by the Jahvist writer with the 
descendants of Cain, and apparently with sin as their con- 
sequence if not their cause. Barton believes that before the 
progress of man from a state of kinship with the animals to a 
state of incipient mastery over nature came to be looked upon 
as a punishable offence bringing death and other physical 
evils in its train (a connexion of thought discoverable in the 
ancient Eabani legend as well as in the Paradise-story), both 
civilisation and the sexual relation were regarded as blessings 
permitted by Jahveh (or Ea, or other corresponding deities), 
the latter of which things was especially commended by the 
example of the sacred tree in the divine homestead, and 
offered to man by the friendly half-divine serpent. According 
to this writer, then, the basis of the story of Paradise and the 
Fall is supplied by the contemplation of the phenomena of 
the primitive Semite’s Arabian oasis. This was the haunt of 
his god; and it became identified with a garden when Arabia 
was exchanged for Babylonia. Its water and trees were 
visible representations of deities. The trees of the oasis were 
palms, the main feature in whose life-history was suggestive 
of those human relations which necessarily loorned very large 
in the life of uncivilised man. 

In a note to p. 118 of his work Prof. Barton adds: “My 
friend, Prof. W. Max Miiller, tells me that the whole Paradise- 
story of Genesis, which, as we have seen, reflects primitive 
Semitic ideas, has a parallel in the hieroglyphic Egyptian” ; 
and this he explains as due to the fact that institutions 
proved for Arabia were born in N. Africa}, 

The serpent is introduced, in the Paradise-story, simply 
as a speaking animal, cleverer than the other beasts of the 


1 For Prof. W. Max Miiller’s information on this point, kindly supplied to the 
present writer, see last chapter, p. 36. 

It must be borne in mind, of course, that Prof. Barton’s interesting book 
is a pioneering work, and one which to some extent breaks new ground. His 
speculations are used here tentatively, therefore, and are not to be regarded as 
altogether possessing finality. 

In his first chapter this writer deals with the theories as to the situation of 
‘the cradle of the Semites,’ and concludes in favour of the view that though 
Arabia was the specific home whence they spread, yet N. Africa was the primitive 
seat of the Hamito-Semitic race. 


72 The Psychological Origin [ CHAP. 


field’. But it is quite plain from the narrative itself that he only 
became the creeping animal known to us in consequence of 
punishment for his temptation of Eve, And it is strongly 
suggested that he had originally been regarded as more than 
a beast endowed with erect posture, power of speech, and 
exceptional sagacity. He was even more than the ordinary 
jinn or demoniac animal. He is acquainted with the real 
nature and potency of the forbidden tree, “and speaks as if 
he were on terms of intimacy with the divine circle”; “as if 
he were in a position to say exactly what the Deity knew*.” 
He attributes misrepresentation to Jahveh, and the truth of 
the charge is practically admitted in the words, “ Behold the 
man is become as one of us to know good and evil‘,’ and in 
the failure of the threat of instant death to take effect®. This 
certainly seems to point to a more primitive story in which 
the serpent was a supernatural being, higher than man; a 
legendary story, in fact, the mythology of which has paled 
and almost been extinguished. Whether the serpent was 
represented in such an earlier tradition Prometheus-like, as 
the friend of man, who revealed to him the source of divinely 
forbidden wisdom; or whether, as Barton has suggested, he 
was a half-divine animal which offered to man the gift of the 
knowledge of sex, a gift which the primitive Semitic mind 
did not, and could not, conceive as divinely forbidden, we 
cannot say. Such conjectures can be collected and com- 
pared ; but in the present state of our knowledge, certainly, 
they can no more be established than they can lightly be 
dismissed. It is overwhelmingly probable, however, that the 
vole of tempter was assigned to the serpent only when the 
legendary basis of the story, whatever may have been its 
earlier significance, was utilised to explain the existence of 


1 Josephus seems to have seriously believed in the power of animals to speak. 
The Book of Fubilees, which he perhaps follows, teaches that all the animals spoke 
before the Fall; but this reads more like an afterthought than the naive statement 
of Gen. ili. 

2 This was afterwards explicitly taught by the Rabbis; see p. 152. 

3 ET OY 0. bili ΠΡ 1 

4 Gen, ili. 22. 

5 This is usually explained as implying an act of mercy on the part of Jahveh; 
but there is no more evidence for this view than for the other. 


IT] of the Fall-story 73 


human ills and to bid us see their cause in sin. This use of 
the serpent was only possible to a nation which had acquired 
a relatively high ethical conception of God, and to a writer 
who was prepared to attribute man’s loss of Paradise, if not 
his attainment of self-reliant wisdom, to a sin demanding 
punishment. In this attribution to the serpent of a hostility 
to Jahveh, a tendency culminating much later in his identi- 
fication with Satan, we therefore see an example of the way in 
which the Jahvist writer, or the Hebrew folk, impressed upon 
borrowed or inherited legend the mark of their increasingly 
ethical religion. 

Facts have already been adduced to show that the Arabian 
oasis probably furnished both the scenery of the Paradise-story, 
which has survived, and its original significance, which has 
been lost and which we can only tentatively endeavour to 
recover. The oasis, to a society still influenced by animistic 
and totemistic modes of thought, was’a place in which 
gods, animals and men formed one social circle. A speaking 
serpent, possessing more than human knowledge, would be 
-a perfectly natural denizen of such a home. And it would 
seem that it is to such a source, and not to any phenomenon 
or abstract conception symbolised by the serpent! in mytho- 


1 The subjects of serpent-symbolism and serpent-worship are too vast to be 
entered upon here, especially as they form one of the favourite resorts of dilettan- 
tism, and but little that is of scientific value has been written upon them. The 
facts are so numerous and yarious that the mutually inconsistent theories intended 
to generalise them seem equally plausible and equally impossible. The serpent, in 
different mythologies, and even in the myths of the same people, symbolises many 
ideas ; and it is as yet premature, if not wholly arbitrary and fanciful, to attempt 
to trace these to a common root. Thus one of the most primitive and fundamental 
uses of the figure of the serpent (or dragon) is its symbolisation of the lightning, 
the storm-cloud or chaos generally, the supposed enemies of the sun, withholding 
its blessings from man. This symbol, derived from solar mythology, is common 
to the most ancient Aryan (Vedic) as well as to Semitic thought, and is found 
somewhat frequently in poetical passages of the O.T.; probably it is a Babylonian 
element, naturalised at an early date and underlying the Creation story of Gen. i. 
Such Nature-symbolism, or mythology proper, will not, however, account for all 
serpent-imagery. Another group of ideas akin to one another, with which the 
serpent is associated, are those of life, ancestry, generation, health, healing, im- 
mortality. Again we have the serpent representing cleverness and wisdom, and 
connected with mantic practices; and finally it is often the earth-dwelling, 
autochthonous animal, the natural guardian of earth’s treasures. Each of these 
ideas has been exclusively associated with the tempter of Gen. iii. It is obvious, 


74 The Psychological | Origin | CHAP. 


logy proper or in the folk-lore of partially civilised peoples, 
that we are to turn, if we would seek for the most probable 
origin of the details and scenery of the Fall-story. We are 


-then presented with conceptions suggested by such natural 


objects as the early Semite was most familiar with. And if 
the facts hitherto collected, admittedly too scanty to be as 
yet gathered into a final induction or theory of the history of 
the Paradise-legend from the creation of its germ in remotely 
ancient Semite society to the time of the Jahvist document, 
may be knit together, for the modest purpose of giving them 
temporary arrangement and of inviting the criticism by which 
knowledge of such a subject can alone be furthered, into a 
working hypothesis of which conjecture largely forms the 
connecting tissue, the following view may be suggested. 
While the Semites were still in their common Arabian 
home, or even in their supposed Hamito-Semitic cradle, 
while animism and totemism were their natural and inevitable 
modes of thought, their religion and science centred largely 
round the double association of the palm-tree, connecting the 
origin of knowledge of sex with that of the first steps in 
civilisation arising out of husbandry. This view, most clearly 
formulated in the recent work of Prof. Barton, and having 
some basis at least in fact, is confirmed by the fragments of 
Hamite tradition soon to be published by Prof. W. Max Miiller, 
as well as by the Eabani legend, which carries us back to an 
extremely ancient date and primitive stage of thought and 
culture, and in which we meet with a similar association of 


from what has been said, that such associations could only attach to the serpent 
at all in a stage of development of the story prior to that on which it entered when 
incorporated into the Jahvist history. It will be clear also that some at least of 
these significations could never have belonged to the serpent of the Paradise-story ; 
perhaps all but one or two are wide of the mark and none of them is relevant. 

On the subject of serpent-symbolism the student may refer to the following 
works, whence he will find fuller references to the literature: Baudissin, Sem7z. 
Religionsgeschichte τ. ; Goldziher, Mythos bet den Hebradern; Fergusson, Tree and 
Serpent Worship; Cobb, Origines Fiudaicae; Keary, Primitive Belief; Wake, 
Serpent Worship; Cox, Aryan Mythology, τι. 114; Mahly; Die Schlange im 
Mythus; Squiers, Serpent Symbolism; Jennings, Phallicism ; Forlong, River of 
Life; Massey, 7he Natural Genesis. Most of these works must be read, however, 
with great caution, and with a healthy scepticism as to the finality of any of their 
generalisations on the subject here in question. 


111 | | of the Fall-story 75 


ideas. A legend embodying these conceptions would be 
carried to Babylonia, and, undergoing modification in terms 
of Babylonian civilisation and advancement in religious 
thought, would seem to have become closely connected with 
Fa and Eridu. The scenery of the desert oasis would be 
exchanged for that of a garden of the gods. The tree 
of life would gather associations with health and_ healing, 
sustenance and immortality, over and above (and perhaps 
increasingly to the exclusion. of) its earliest association with 
the phenomena of reproduction. 

Knowledge, of whatever kind (and we have seen that the 
date-palm and the god Ea of Eridu were associated with both 
knowledge of sex and practical wisdom), would continue to 
be regarded as divinely permitted or divinely given: so much 
may be gathered, we have found, from Babylonian myths. 
With legends of this nature, referring indirectly to human 
origins, would come to be associated the dream, arising 
everywhere spontaneously in the mind of man, of a previous 
age of simplicity of hfe and immunity from the trouble 
necessarily incidental to widening experience and increasing 
culture. The home of the gods became the primitive abode 
of man. The geography of the earthly Paradise, embodied 
afterwards in the Hebrew story, became fixed in the Babylo- 
nian tradition. And such a composite legend was naturalised 
in Canaan during the millennium preceding the Israelitish 
immigration. Modified again, we may suppose, according to 
the bent of Canaanitish thought and tradition, the legend, 
amongst many others, became now the property of the 
Hebrews, who doubtless would still possess, as a heritage 
from the distant past, conceptions similar to those of the 
older forms of the now essentially Babylonian story. The 
Jahvist compiler, probably aided by other scribes before him, 
collects such folk-lore. He deliberately attempts a somewhat 
systematic history of origins: of man, of sex, of primitive life, 
of beginnings of culture and of the ills and toils of human 
existence, of the entrance and growth of sin. In common 
with others of his time, he is painfully conscious of the dark 
side of human self-advancement, and is charged with the 
Hebrew feeling that many human ambitions are arrogant 


76 The Psychological Origin [CHAP. 


encroachments on the unique rights and prerogatives of Jahveh. 
He feels strongly too about sin and the misery it has caused. 
Somewhat naturally, and with an insight which was deep if 
not wholly clear, he takes-the old legend of the origin of 
man’s knowledge, now both a culture-myth and a Paradise- 
story, and makes it also serve the purpose of accounting for the 
introduction of human sin. Thus there emerges, for the first 
time, a “ Fall-story.” This writer is conservative of the externals 
of his venerable tradition ; he is zealously reformatory, though, 
fortunately for the archaeologist, not wholly successful, in 
stripping it of its previous heathenism and its coarser signi- 
ficance ; he is earnestly religious in making it minister to the 
interests of the Jahvism of his time. Hence the present form 
of the story: its composite nature, its conflicting standpoints, 
its didactic meaning, its abiding worth. 


* * * * * * 


Much, of course, of the contents of this chapter is matter 
of conjecture. The purpose of what has been written, how- 
ever, has not been to attempt to establish conclusions as to 
the details with which the chapter has been concerned. On 
the contrary, the aim has rather been to show, in many cases, 
their individual uncertainty. It has rather been intended to 
strengthen the general evidence, external and internal, that 
the Fall-story was the result of the perfectly natural and 
necessary processes of human speculative thought working 
upon material of legendary nature partly derived in turn from 
mythology, and also to indicate the psychological conditions 
under which its conceptions must be supposed to have arisen. 
The story as a whole may be compared to a quarry in which 
several strata of different antiquity, with their characteristic 
organic remains, are at once exposed to view: or, more aptly, 
to a cave into which the relics of such different strata have 
been swept. Though the detailed history of its growth can 
perhaps never be recovered, the general course and conditions 
of its construction, it is hoped, have been made clear; The 
general results to which these three chapters have led may be 
summed up thus: the Fall-story contains elements cf various 
degrees of antiquity, which were the natural products of 


111 | of the Fall-story ΠῚ 


human thought at relatively early stages of its development ; 
it is a fusion of aetiological legends embodying conceptions 
which arose in the animistic stage of the evolution of religion ; 
it states the results of early. reflection on matters pertaining 
to the beginnings of human life; and it was intended by the 
writer or editor as the equivalent of history which, at his 
time, was not clearly distinguished from products of the 
imagination. It breathes, however, the spirit of Hebrew 
religion as it was passing into ethical monotheism. 


* * * ΩΣ * * 


While proceeding to discuss the import and the conse- 
quences of the view of the origin and nature of the Fall-story 
to which the foregoing investigation has led, it will be well 
briefly to examine the other two modes of interpreting it 
which have generally found favour in the past. 

The narrative has been taken, both in ancient and modern 
times, to be a literal statement of historical truth. Passing 
by the modes of defence of this position adopted by early 
Western Fathers and Reformation divines, it will suffice to 
notice the basis upon which it has been supported by more 
recent scholars. The fact, which the modern science of com- 
parative religion has brought to light, that somewhat similar 
stories to those of the opening chapters of Genesis occur 
widely scattered through the literary remains of ancient nations, 
appeared to many investigators in this field to find its best 
explanation in the view that such stories were corrupted forms 
of a genuine tradition handed down from the very beginning 
of human history ; which tradition, in its pure and true form, 
was enshrined in the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures. The great 
scholar Lenormant was, for instance, of this opinion; though 
one can scarcely believe that, had he lived a little later, he 
would have been able to retain such a position’. It is now 


1 For an elaborate defence of this same view, marshalling a great array of scientific 
facts in a somewhat unscientific spirit, see a fairly recent work, Zockler’s Urstand 
des Menschen. Several great geologists, e.g. Sir J. W. Dawson, have also supplied 
facts and reasoning with a view to upholding the historical truth of the narratives ; 
which attempts, detached from the main line of scientific testimony, have been 
utilised in the interests of the traditional opinion in several theological treatises. 


78 The Psychological Origin | CHAP. 


generally abandoned by archaeologists and theologians alike’. 
Indeed, if man is evolved from a non-human ancestry, if his 
reason, language, morals and religion are the product of 
gradual development, if his antiquity is what geology asserts 
it to be, and his earliest condition, as human, that to which 
several sciences now strongly point, it is quite impossible to 
entertain at all the view that the Fall-story, and the legends 
kindred to it, embody any genuine tradition once common to 
the race, or, therefore, any scientific or historical truth. This 
supposition would logically necessitate the theory of the 
special creation of man, and that of an original or primitive 
revelation. All that we know of prehistoric man, derived 
from many and varied sources and many independent methods 
of empirical investigation, renders the view that such a 
tradition could be true or, if true, could have been handed 
down to historical times, altogether untenable. It must 
therefore be considered as utterly unfaithful to the cumulative 
and conclusive results of modern study, still to seek for even 
a kernel of historical truth, and a basis for a theological 
doctrine of human nature, in such a narrative as the Fall- 
story of the Book of Genesis*. 


1 Tt still lives, however, in Germany as well as in England: as, ¢.g., in some 
Arts. in Hauck’s Real Enucyclopadie. 

2 For the same conclusion see Dillman, Gemests 1., E.T. vol. I. p. 99, on 
the subject. It is impossible to substantiate here the assertions made in the text ; 
the task would require several chapters. The following references will, however, 
enable the student unfamiliar with the sciences involved to find access to the 
chief results that are relevant, and to make himself acquainted with the methods 
of investigation and reasoning by which they have been reached. Darwin, Origin 
of Spectes, Descent of Mlan; Romanes, Darwin and After-Darwin, vol. τ. ; ALlental 
Evolution in Man; Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation; Tylor, Primitive Culture 
and Early Hestory of Mankind; A. Lang, Making of Religion, Myth Ritual and 
Religion; Keane, Ethnology; Clodd, Story of Primitive Man; P. Kropotkin, 
XIXth Cent., March, 1896; Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics; Réville, History of 
Religions, pp. 35-64 (on impossibility of primitive revelation or tradition). For 
views opposed in various respects to those embodied in the foregoing works, the 
student may consult the writings of Max Miiller on Mythology and Religion, and 
of Dr Fairbairn and Sir J. W. Dawson. Prof. Orr gives references which are 
relevant in his Christian view of God and the World, but the natural science of 
this work must be received in some cases with great caution, inasmuch as it one- 
sidedly represents the opinion of the minority in the scientific world. 

5. The untenability of the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin, whose history 
is being examined in the present work, has been fully discussed from the point of 


111 | of the Falt-story 79 


We pass to an altogether different question when we ask 
whether the Jahvist writer himself understood his account of 
the loss of Paradise to be history. And it is a question which 
it is not easy definitely to answer. The narrative has here 
been discussed on the supposition that it was compiled out of 
folk-lore, and was probably regarded by its author or literary 
editor, if not as history, at any rate as a working substitute 
for history. It occurs in a context which certainly was 
intended to supply information as to the origin of things, 
and a record of the earliest doings of mankind. But it seems 
natural to believe that in its writer’s day it was somewhat 
difhcult to estimate the .difference between imaginative 
poetry, especially if venerable as tradition, and an account 
of actual fact. To ask whether, in introducing into his story 
of the distant past the magical trees and the speaking 
serpent, not as extraordinary matvels? but as belonging to 
the natural course of things, the writer was conscious of their 
legendary and fictitious nature’, or whether he intended them 
to be regarded as historical realities, is perhaps to commit 
oneself to a wrong statement of the question at issue. These 
alternatives were not so clearly differentiated in the Jahvist’s 
day as they are in ours. We are rather dealing with an age 
in which the line between the natural and the supernatural, 
and that between legend and history, were only vaguely 
drawn. The thought of that time was scarcely troubled 
with the distinction between what was possible and what 
impossible. If Josephus could take the details of this story 
as historical, and if Mohammed “would not eat lizards 
because he fancied them to be the offspring of a metamor- 
phosed clan of Israelites*,’ we need scarcely wonder at a 
writer of about the 9th century B.C. seriously describing the 
Paradisaic age in terms of mythical conceptions, and offering 
his traditional narrative as the equivalent of history. 


view of natural science and philosophy in the author’s Hulsean Lectures on Zhe 
Origin and Propagation of Sin, Camb. Univ. Press, 1902. 

1 As seems to be the case in the account of Balaam’s ass. 

2 As Schultz (0.7. Theology) and Cheyne (Zucycl. Bibl. Art. Adam and Eve) 
believe. 

PV kG, πίῃ: 


80 The Psychological Origin [ CHAP. 


If this view of the writer's own attitude towards his 
literary production be adopted, the main evidence for its 
truth being perhaps the comparatively easy way in which the 
narrative may be expounded in the light of it, the possibility 
that the story was originally intended for allegory is 
necessarily excluded. It has often been held that the 
narrative of the Fall is a symbolic description of the origin of 
sin in general, in the individual as well as in the race, whose 
essential truth is assured by the inspiration of the sacred 
book in which it finds a place. One of the representatives of 
this view in modern times best known to English readers is 
S. T. Coleridge, whose discussion of the Fall and of Original 
Sin in the Azds to Reffection, \argely following Kant’s use 
of the Bible story in the interests of his theory of radical evil, 
is based on the supposition that Adam was intended to be 
the representative of all his successors. Coleridge tells us 
that it was his own deliberate and conscientious conviction 
that the proofs of allegorical interpretation having been the 
intention of the inspired writer or compiler of the book of 
Genesis “lie on the face of the narrative itself.” 

This view, however, has been almost entirely abandoned ; 
at least by theologians. , Exegesis alone renders it untenable. 
The narrative supplies its own proof that, even supposing it 
was not to be taken perfectly literally, it was not intended for 
an allegory. The curse of the serpent, condemning it and its 
seed after it (the serpent race), to creep upon the ground and 
eat the dust, of necessity implies that the writer had in mind 
a real animal ; not the personification of a ‘ principle of evil’ 
which introduced sin into the human world ‘from without,’ 
still less a symbol of the seductive power of temptation, or of 
the lower nature, after the later manner of Philo and other 
allegorical interpreters. And if the serpent cannot stand here 
for an allegorical symbol, the same must needs be said of the 
tree of knowledge ; for it plainly belongs to the same circle of 
ideas, and must have a similar signification. We have indeed 
already seen that the semi-allegorical interpretation which 


1 Aids to Reflection, end of note to 7th reflection on Aphorism cvili. ; ed. Fenby, 
1896, p- 229. 


111 | of the Fall-story 81 


makes the forbidden tree the indirect means whereby moral 
self-determination might be, rightly or wrongly, acquired, is 
exegetically impossible. Another argument which is fatal to 
the view that the Fall-story was intended as an allegorical 
representation of the origin of sin in a universal sense is sup- 
plied by the fact that the narrative appears in, and indeed is 
essentially interwoven with, a context which plainly professes 
to supply information as to the beginnings of human history. 
Whatever be the didactic value of the story, it could not have 
been inserted where it is if its purpose were merely homi- 
letic or psychological, and if it treated of temptation and sin 
in general rather than of the history of the first parents of the 
race. And, finally, it may well be doubted whether allegory 
of so abstract a nature as would pertain to this story, if it were 
allegory at all, was historically possible to the Jahvist writer. 
The imagery which is in any degree of an allegorical nature 
in pre-exilic writings is of a very much more elementary 
character, rather to be described as fable or parable when 
it is more than simple personification or metaphor. To look 
for complex allegory, therefore, in Gen. iii. is to commit an 
anachronism. Indeed, were allegory a literary method of the 
eighth or ninth century B.C., it is far removed from the naive 


1 It may be added here that in fable and allegory the imagery is invented 
in order to express dramatically the didactic purpose ; in the Fall-story the lessons 
are obviously superimposed upon the pre-existing material, and have probably 
been the cause of its free manipulation. 

* Hosea’s representation of the tribe of Ephraim as a man, and the com- 
parison of Jahveh’s relation with Israel to that of human marriage, belong to 
the simplest type of imagery. Similar are the representations of Israel as a 
vineyard (Ps. ]xxx.), or as a harlot (Ezek. xvi.), and the comparisons of the king 
of Tyre to a mythical inhabitant, or ‘the Assyrian.’ to a tree, of Eden (Ezek. xxviii. 
and xxxi.); more complex are Ezek. xvi. and some of this prophet’s ‘ parables,’ e.g. 
xvii. 2-10: but all these are examples rather of allegorical imagery than of allegory. 
The fables of Judges ix. 8ff., 2 Kings xiv. 9-10, and the parables of 2 Sam. xii. 
1-6 and Isai. v. 1-7, are not at all of the nature of the Philonic allegory asserted to 
be intended in Gen. iii. All these images represent one concrete thing by another 
concrete thing ; there is no personification of an abstraction and embodiment of a 
general concept in a fitting material symbol. There is in fact no allegory proper 
in the Old Test. Not that any hard objective distinction can be drawn between 
the meanings of words of such elastic signification as symbol, fable, parable, 
allegory, etc.; but there is a great difference between O.T. literary imagery, in all 
its forms, and Philo’s usage of the Fall-story, where real allegory appears. 


T. 6 


8: The Psychological Origin | CHAP. 


concreteness which forms one great charm of the Jahvist’s 
style. 

Explanation more or less allegorical still finds its place, to 

ome extent, even in modern scientific commentaries. Reuss 

regards the story as a psychological and ethical myth treating 
of a daily occurrence, a general and symbolic description 
suitable to all particular sins: that is, an allegory. Dillmann 
opposes this view ; but while denying that the narrative can 
possibly embody. a true tradition, denies also that its writer 
intended it for history. In his opinion, it is related to the 
myths of other nations, but is to be distinguished from them 
by an essential difference. The peculiar relation of Israel to 
God involves that the story contains actual truths about 
man’s nature (Wahrheiten, richtige Gedanken)}. 

The same assertion is involved in the designations ‘ revela- 
tion-myth, ‘religious myth,‘ inspired myth’ which have been 
applied to it by various writers. Such a judgment, which 
cannot be derived inductively from the narrative itself, but is 
based upon a particular theory of inspiration deduced from 
certain doctrines, or from a survey of Old Testament literature 
as a whole, we are not now concerned to dispute, inasmuch 
as the problems which at present form the subject of our 
investigation are purely exegetical, historical and scientific. 
But if such assertions and designations are intended to per- 
petuate the supposition that the third chapter of Genesis is 
“a combination of history and sacred symbolism?,” or to 
imply that its inspiration guarantees for it any scientific or 
historical truth about human nature other than that which is 
contained in its very simple psychology of so complex a 
thing as temptation, then the drift of all that has been said 
in this and the preceding chapters may be summed up in 
their repudiation. | 

There has already been occasion to use the term myth, 
which there has long been a growing tendency to apply to 
the story of the Fall. But this narrative is not a myth. If 
the allegory is too late a product with which to identify the 
story, the myth, in any of the stricter acceptations of the term, 


1 Genesis, 6% Auflage, 5. 43. 
2 Martensen, Dogmatics, E.T. 1866, p. 155. 


seg of the Fall-story 83 


is much too early a one. Elements in the imagery of the nar- 
rative, e.g. the garden of Jahveh, the magical trees, the serpent, 
of course belong to the realm of what has generally been 
called the mythological; certainly they are legendary. These 
conceptions were “produced by the unconscious play of 
plastic fancy,” and are, as the preceding chapter was intended 
to show, entirely on an equality with heathen mythical 
figures or ideas. And in so far as its imagery is of this 
nature (and we have seen reason to conjecture that its 
motive was once more crude than it is now), the narrative 
can be said to be mythological. But still the story as a 
whole is not a myth. There is no one name, as a recent 
writer has remarked, by which it can be adequately described. 
It is, we repeat, an equivalent for history dating from a time 
when fact and fancy were not sharply differentiated ; and if 
this were all, it might be called an ‘aetiological myth’: but it 
is something more. The Fall-story is an attempt at philo- 
sophy, and an attempt of a different kind from that which 
is sometimes the purpose of the mere myth. It still uses 
mythological objects, in place of inaccessible historical facts, 
for the concrete presentation of its teaching; but in its theo- 
logical and ethical implications, which, after all, constitute its 
abiding worth, it has emancipated itself from the character- 
istics of primitive mythological speculation, and deserves 
a place amongst the earliest attempts at theological philo- 
sophy}. 

The term myth, the application of which to the Fall-story 
as a whole we cannot justify, is one of elastic usage and 
indefinite signification. Some writers on comparative mytho- 
logy have endeavoured to restrict its use exclusively to what 


1 Inasmuch as philosophy, science and theology all originate in mythology, 
and the point at which each of them emerges from that condition is difficult to 
define, we are dealing here with a question of degree rather than of kind. 

The Fall-story has been called a ‘genetic fiction’ (Redslob, Der Schopfungs- 
Afolog, 1846), and has been compared with the numerous O.T. narratives 
invented to account for existing customs, etc. ; e.g. the stories of the shrinking of 
Jacob’s thigh, of the institution of the Sabbath, of the meaning of the rainbow, etc. 
Genesis is rich in such genetic fictions, and the narrative Gen. ii. 4—iii. is full of 
them. The term is perhaps better than ‘aetiological myth,’ but it rather suggests 
the immediate creation of a literary author than the elaboration of existing legend 
or folk-lore for a didactic purpose. 


6—2 


84 The Psychological Origin [ CHAP. 


is often-called the nature-myth. It is in fact asserted by 
certain writers that everything mythological in the broader 
sense is derived from nature myth; this, however, is not 
allowed by other schools, and is an unwarrantable position. 

The nature-myth in its simplest form has been defined as 
the verbal expression of the effects wrought on the human 
mind by natural objects and processes’. It came into being 
with the use of language. It is a symbolic description of 
natural phenomena in terms of man’s experience and 
personality: a primitive metaphor due to the attribution of 
one’s own consciousness to inanimate or impersonal objects. 
To explain, is to trace the unknown back to the known; and 
primitive man could only explain unknown Nature in terms 
of himself, his will, passions, interests and common acts, the 
matters of his most immediate and vivid experience. Mytho- 
logy, in this sense, is a form of mental activity through 
which developing human intelligence must inevitably. pass ; 
it is a necessary stage in mankind’s intellectual growth. It 
formed the first common-sense view of the world. It was 
the only way in which the results of intercommunication of 
primitive thought between an individual and his fellows could 
be expressed. 

According to those who see in animism one of the widest 
generalisations with regard to early human thought, dream- 
images played a very considerable part in moulding man’s 
conception of the universe. Hence came the peopling of 
Nature with spiritual beings similar to the soul which was 
supposed to live, during sleep, independently of the body. 
Thus a quasi-personal agency is attached to objects; gods 
are placed behind phenomena. Moreover primitive thought 
had not arrived at a clear distinction between the inorganic 
and the organic, or between the organic and the human 
worlds. “The poet ignores the scientific knowledge of 
Nature when he describes a river or a tree: the savage does 
not ignore it, for he never had it*” The mythical mode of 


1 Goldziher, Mythos bei den Hebraern. 
2 Stout, Psychology, vol. 11.; cf. Hoffding, Psychology, E.T. In connexion 


with these pages the student may be referred to Schultze, Psychologie der Natur- 
volker, 1900. 


1Π]| of the Fatl-story 85 


describing Nature, assisted by conceptions derived from 
animism, would be the source, as has already been said, of 
science, philosophy and theology, if not religion. And the 
theist believes, for reasons of a philosophical and theological 
nature, that while human thought was on this low plane and 
was distantly groping after religious truth, the natural process 
of its progress was already guided by the Supreme Reason 
immanent in that of man. This ‘revelation, no longer 
conceivable, in the light of modern knowledge, as a com- 
munication from a wholly transcendent God acting from 
without, addressed itself to, and necessarily expressed itself 
in terms of, such mythical modes of thought as we have just 
stated to have once been characteristic of mankind’s mental 
life. We cannot base our faith in such divine guidance on 
an empirical study of the early narratives contained in our 
sacred records. Of themselves, these yield no such assurance; 
they only do so when interpreted in the light of a generali- 
sation from Old Testament studies collectively, made under 
the guidance of previously and independently formed theo- 
logical beliefs. Still the records serve to illustrate the belief 
that God’s self-manifestation, though no longer to be regarded 
as what was called a ‘ primitive revelation, was already active 
when mankind inevitably thought and spoke in terms of 
‘myth,’ 

In later stages of the development of thought, when 
increased intercommunication between subjects had rendered 
human knowledge more objective (a process of which our 
natural science is but the continuation), its anthropomorphism 
was reduced, and myths therefore gradually became less 
mythological. They came to deal with what was in part 
objectively, instead of what was merely subjectively, true. 
Thus grew up the product which some would exclude from 
the connotation of the term myth, the aetiological, or the 
philosophical, myth?. If Kuhn’s derivation of Prometheus 


1 To avoid repetition of what has been said elsewhere the author may be 
allowed to refer to pp. 141 ff. of Zhe Origin and Propagation of Sin. 

* Thus nature-myth frequently passed into cosmogony. The numerous refer- 
ences in the O.T. to the figures Rahab, Leviathan, etc., are allusions to the old 
Babylonian nature-myth of Tiamat which underlies the cosmogony of Gen. i. 


86 The Psychological Origin [ CHAP. 


from pramantha be correct, the development of the Greek 
legend from the ancient Aryan nature-myth furnishes an 
admirable illustration of this process. Similarly the myth 
proper developed into the legend, and instead of merely 
embodying man’s primitive thought about natural pheno- 
mena, began to differentiate into what passed for knowledge 
about the self, the world and God. As religion became more 
and more monotheistic among the Hebrews, the tendency 
to banish mythology of Nature increased proportionately. 
Mythical, or, to speak more correctly, legendary figures persist 
in the story of Paradise; but myth has here made the 
transition into intended history, and the conceptions which 
belong to mythology or to legend are entirely subservient to 
moral and theological purpose. 

Besides the sense of the word ‘myth’ already mentioned 
(nature-myth), to which one school of writers seeks to restrict 
it, there are others in which it is commonly used. There are 
not only legendary productions which are developments of 
nature myths, such as cosmogonies and some culture-myths, 
but also the class called etymological. myths, and many 
culture-myths and cult-myths which cannot wholly be traced 
to this particular origin. These would be included in such a 
definition of myth as is given, for instance, by Réville!: “The 
myth is either the description of a natural phenomenon 
considered as the exponent of a divine drama, or else the 
incorporation of a moral idea in a dramatic narrative. In 
both cases, that which is permanent or frequent in nature and 
in humanity is brought together into one event accomplished 
once and for all, and the drama, although invented, is looked 
upon as real?” 


See, especially, Gunkel’s Schopfung und Chaos. Some think the deluge stories, 
in which the world is so rich, to be founded upon nature-myth ; but this is very 
doubtful. 

1 Prolegomena of the History of Religions, E.T. p. 111. 

2 Of quite distinct nature from the myth proper, which results from the 
natural play of primitive intelligence, is much of the fanciful literary fiction 
which we meet with, for instance, in later Jewish writings, apocalyptic and rab- 
binical; also the gnostic ‘mythology’ which consists largely in the personification 
of abstract conceptions. Such relatively modern examples of what is sometimes 
loosely called ‘mythology’ are not specimens of thought natural and necessary to 


1Π]| of the Fall-story | 87 


τ 


We conclude then, that the Fall-story is not a myth in 
any of the senses to which modern scientific. usage restricts 
that term ; it can only be called mythological in the sense 
that it ΕΝ in a fossil state, legendary or mythological | 
matter. It has no similarity, either, to a Platonic myth, or to 
an allegory. But it is possible to make two statements with 
regard to the biblical narrative of which we have now com- 
pleted the investigation, each of which has been asserted with — 
regard to true mythology. Firstly, the explanation of the story 
ought to be nothing but its history’. Allegorical interpretations 
of it, to quote words used by Robertson Smith in reference to 
myths, “are the falsest of false guides as to the original 
meaning ” of the story. And secondly, the narrative, like af 
proper myth, “is the history of its authors, not of its subjects®.” 
It records some stages of developing theological speculation : 
| it tells us nothing of the human nature we inherit, or of th 
| history of the first parents of our race. 
| The bearing of the conclusion thus reached, with regard 
to the nature of the Fall-story, upon the ‘inspiration’ of the 
Scripture of which it forms a part, cannot here be fully 
discussed. The view most likely to be adopted by those who 
agree only in part with the opinion expressed in the latter 
portion of this chapter will be such as was put forward by 
the late Prof. Hort. After stating his disbelief in the histori- 
cal character of the biblical account of the Fall, this scholar 
said: “But the early chapters of Genesis remain a divinely 
appointed parable or apologue setting forth important prac- 
tical truths on subjects which, as a matter of history, lie 
outside our present ken. Whether or not the corrupted state 
of human nature was preceded in temporal sequence by an 
incorrupt state, this is the most vivid and natural way of 
exhibiting the truth that in God’s primary purpose man was 


the age which produced it, but exhibit a literary phenomenon comparable with 
what, in the sphere of biology, is termed degeneration. It will be needless to add 
that the myths of Plato, to allude to another literary product which has received 
the name of myth, have nothing in common with myths in the modern scientific 
sense, nor again with a narrative such as that of Genesis iil. They are a conscious 
resort to poetic imagination where philosophy has failed to help. 

1 De la Saussaye, AM/anual of the science of religion, E. T. 1891, pp. 222-3, ete. 

2 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891, 1. p. 416. 


88 Lhe Fatt-story [CHAP. III 


jincorrupt, so that the evil in him should be regarded as 
having a secondary or adventitious character. Ideal ante- 
cedence is, as it were, pictured in temporal antecedence*.” 
In the light of the probable past history of the Fall-story, 
and according to the view that its writer intended it as 
equivalent to history, this mode of regarding the narrative, as 
an ideal picture, cannot exactly be adopted here. 1: it could, 
a more or less definite view as to wherein lay its ‘ inspiration’ 
would lie close at hand. It would seem, however, to the 
present writer that the inspiration of the story is a little 
further to seek; and it may be added that the time for 
defining what ought to be meant by predicating inspiration 
of such a narrative has not yet come. Certainly, what man 
has thought about his race and about his God, even when 
such thought is embodied in the Bible, cannot, without 
further inquiry, be put down as what God has revealed to 
man. The problem is by no means so simple. For the 
present, whilst resolutely declining to interpret the Old 
Testament narrative by any @ priori theory of inspiration 
whatever, we may seek to prepare for a future definition, to 
be made in the light of zzductively established facts about the 
passage of Scripture here in question. 


* * * * * * 


The reader who is curious to study what may be called theosophical 
explanations of the Fall-story is referred to the writings of Jacob Béhme, 
Baader and Steffens. Space cannot be found here for an account of the 
eccentricities of modern speculation on the subject. 


1 Life and Letters, vol. 11 p. 329. 


(ΕΠ ΧΡ TAYE 


THE PREPARATION IN THE OLD TESTAMENT FORA 
DOCTRINE OF THE FALL AND OF ORIGINAL SIN. 


It has been made evident by the general tendency, as 
well as by certain details, of the subject-matter of the preced- 
ing chapters on the Paradise-story, that any such doctrines as 
that of a fall of the race in Adam, or that of a corruption of 
human nature and of hereditary transmission of its sinful 
bias, are not contained in it. They were not intended to be 
conveyed either by the original traditions on which the 
narrative is based, or by the literary product which is the out- 
come of the elaboration and reconstruction received by these 
legendary traditions at the hands of the compiler of the Jahvist 
document. It is now necessary to investigate the rise and 
development of these doctrines which later theology so closely 
associated with the story of Paradise and the sin of Adam. 
In the first place we shall need to inquire whether the Fall- 
story of Genesis was used in later Old Testament writings, 
and, if so, to what extent and in what manner. Allusion 
must then be made to another ancient piece of Hebrew folk- 
lore imbedded in Genesis, which, from about the Maccabean 
age, was commonly utilised in connexion with speculation 
on the origin of human sin. Finally, it will be necessary to 
trace the growth, in the canonical books of the Old Testa- 
ment, of certain conceptions connected with sin and involved 
in the doctrines with whose history we are here concerned. 
This will be to sketch, in some of its aspects, the growth of 


00 Preparation in the Old Test. |CHAP. 


Old Testament teaching with regard to sin. The doctrine of 
sin in its completeness, however, ineludes more than the 
present work takes upon itself to investigate, and its general 
treatment will therefore not be undertaken. Indeed this is 
all the more unnecessary now that we possess a work upon 
the subject by Dr Clemen}, and that the English reader has 
been furnished with a useful and concise article dealing with 
the Old Testament doctrine of sin, from the pen of Canon 
Bernard’. 


The use of the Fall-story in the Old Testament. 


It has frequently been remarked that the later books of 
the Old Testament are practically wanting in references to the 
‘history of origins’ contained in the early chapters of Genesis. 
The Fall-story as a whole, its didactic meaning and its quasi- 
history of the beginnings of human sin, seem never to be 
alluded to, unless the passage of Ezekiel’ discussed in the 
preceding chapter is directly based upon the narrative of 
Gen. 1i—iii. This is perhaps less probable than that the 
prophet drew from a variant of the Genesis story, less purged 
of its original legendary character or else more highly embel- 
lished with foreign additions. Nevertheless we have here a 
reference to the story which, still floating in oral tradition, 
perhaps, in Ezekiel’s day, had been used by the Jahvist 
writer as the basis of his history. The doctrinal use, if we 
may use the expression, of this tradition by Ezekiel, so far 
as connexion with our subject is concerned, is, however, 
absolutely zz/. 

For the rest, we only find in the Old Testament the 
isolated occurrence of conceptions which also appear in 
Genesis as individual details of the imagery of the Paradise 
narrative; and such references, on account of their frag- 
mentary nature, are wholly unimportant. They probably 
imply that the legendary notions of a garden of Jahveh, a 


1 Die Lehre von der Stinde, Theil 1. 
2 Art. Sz, in vol. Iv. of Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible. 


ιν Jor a doctrine of the Fall ΟΙ 


tree of life, and kindred conceptions’, were living in Hebrew 
tradition, rather than point to literary borrowing from the 
Jahvist history; and they throw no light on the question 
whether any theological use was made of the Fall-story as a 
whole. ) 

It is thus extremely doubtful whether there is any allusion 
in the whole of the Old Testament to the story of Paradise 
and the Fall as that story is told in Genesis, though there are 
indications of remembrance of the legendary traditions 
utilised in the narrative. The reference contained in Ezek. 
XXvill. is the only one to which probability attaches. There 
is certainly no didactic use made of the subject-matter of 
the Fall-story with regard to human sinfulness and its origin. 
This fact is not what might have been expected; and it has 
been variously accounted for. The silence of the Old Testa- 
ment as to the Fall, especially the silence of the Wisdom- 
literature, is strange; because, though the prophets were more 
concerned with the practical treatment of sin than with its 


1 Possible allusions to Adam’s transgression occur in Job xxxi. 25. ΤῸ Π 6 
Adam I covered my transgressions,” and Hos. vi. 7, ‘‘ But they like Adam have 
transgressed the covenant.” But though these renderings have found place in the 
text of the R.V., and that of the former verse at least is still sometimes maintained 
to be the more natural (see, ¢e.g., Gibson’s Commentary on Fob, tn loc.), the alterna- 
tives given in the margin of the R.V., in which for the proper name Adam is 
substituted ‘man’ or ‘men,’ are now generally adopted: see Schultz, O. Zest. 
Theology; Clemen, op. cit.; Hastings, op. czt., Art. Fadi, etc. 

It is noteworthy that the allusions to the garden of Eden (Ezek. xxviii. 13, 
xxxi. 8, 0, Isai. li. 3) belong to the prophets of the captivity: Joel ii. 3 is perhaps 
an exception, though it may be post-exilic. 

The phrase ‘tree of life’ (Prov. iii. 18, xi. 30, xiii. £2) is possibly derived from 
the legendary conception embodied in Gen. ii—iii., and surviving in traditionary 
lore, as well as its equivalent ‘fountain of life’ (Prov. x. 11, ΧΙ. 14, Xiv. 27). 
These again are post-exilic passages. The fact that in Prov. the ‘ fountain of life’ 
is found as a synonym for the ‘tree of life’ makes it less probable that the latter 
term was a definite loan from Gen. 

Other passages, such as Job xxxiv. 15, Ps. xc. 3, Eccles. xii. 7, which speak of 
man’s returning to dust, and Isai. Ixv. 25, Mic. vii. 17, which allude to the serpent 
eating the dust, need not be supposed to have been suggested by the language of 
Genesis. The former expression needs no literary precedent to account for it, and 
the idea of the dust being the serpent’s food must have been a common popular 
belief to have found a place in the Fall-narrative at all. Eccles. vii. 29, ‘“‘ God 
made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions” is hardly an 
allusion to the Fall. Psalm Ixxxii. 7 is no longer appealed to as containing a 
reference to Genesis. Isai. xliii. 27 refers not to Adam but to Jacob. 


92 ‘Preparation tn the Old Test. [(ΗΑΡ. 


theoretical explanation, and were occupied with national 
rather than with universal questions, some of the sapiential 
books deal, to a certain extent, with problems of a nature 
bordering on the philosophical. That of theodicy is handled 
from various points of view in some of these writings; and in 
Job, a work in which the popular view that physical evils 
result wholly from sin is repudiated, and in which the 
question of the source of human sinfulness once or twice 
suggests itself, a reference to Gen. ili. would by no means 
have been irrelevant, especially if any well-known doctrinal 
views had as yet been derived from that chapter. The 
argument from silence is, doubtless, generally precarious; but 
the question is forcibly suggested whether at the time, what- 
ever that was, in which the book of Job was written, any 
inference from the Fall-story, at all resembling that drawn 
by a later age, was authoritatively or widely taught. 

The question why a doctrine of human sinfulness as 
somehow associated with the fall of Adamvwas not thus 
utilised or referred to by late. Old Testament writers is 
distinct from, though connected with, the question: how is it 
that the contents of Gen. 1i—ili., apart from any interpretation 
of them, are so scantily alluded to in later books? Both of 
these questions would be summarily answered if, with 
Ε΄ Delitzsch' and others, we could regard the Jahvist, as well 
as the Priestly, document as post-exilic. This, however, is 
impossible. So far as the Prophetic books are concerned, we 
need not be surprised at the omission. Their writers looked 
to the future rather than to the past; in the past for its own 
sake, especially in the past before the exodus, they had but 
little interest. And, as we have already observed, the 
prophets were national seers, not world-philosophers. We do 
not expect to find in them anything like a theological system. 
But, before the latest of them had passed away, the horizon 
of Hebrew thought had been vastly widened. Theological 
philosophy had developed greatly between the ages repre- 
sented by the Jahvist history and the Book of Job. The 
silence of the sapiential and poetic literature, therefore, needs 
to be accounted for. 


1 Wo lag das Paradies ? 
ὦ 


! 


ιν] Jor a doctrine of the Fall 93 


It has sometimes been suggested that an explanation of 
the absence of allusions, in the later canonical books, to the 
Hebrew Urgeschichte in general is to be sought in the fact 
that it was known to be of foreign origin, and that it had not 
really been assimilated to Hebrew thought. 

This, however, does not appear to be ἃ satisfactory 
explanation. In the first place the narratives of Genesis were 
not wholly, nor directly, nor abruptly, borrowed. There are 
many reasons for believing them to have been gradually 
absorbed and Hebraised; and they might easily have come 
to be regarded, therefore, as immemorially Hebrew, like the 
agricultural pursuits learned through the selfsame medium. 
And further, there are frequent allusions, both in poetic and 
prophetic books, to the mythical figures of Rahab, Leviathan, 
etc., which are admittedly of Babylonian origin. 

Possibly the difficulty receives. its best explanation in the 
reflection that the narratives of Genesis would not be likely to 
exert much influence on Hebrew thought before the canonisa- 
tion of the pentateuch. Certainly in the Book of Job the 
creation of the world is incidentally imaged, and the first man 
is tlluded to, without any recognition of Genesis as the sole 
source of authoritative information on such subjects. The 
date of this work, however, is too uncertain to warrant the 
secure assumption that it was written after the pentateuch 
had acquired canonical authority. If this was not the case ; 
if, for instance, it was written before or during the captivity ; 
it ceases to be extraordinary that the book should not refer 
to, or be guided by, the Jahvist ‘history of origins. And 
this is perhaps, after all, the only book in which such omis- 
sion really calls for notice. If the later date assigned by many 
critics to the Book of Job be justified, the question we have 
raised is still unsolved ; for the early history of Genesis must 
then have*been both taught and reverenced. In any case the 
fact remains that the Old Testament supplies no trace of the 
existence, among the sacred writers, of any zuzterpretation of 
the Fall-story comparable to the later doctrine of the Fall. 

It has occasionally been assumed that some such doctrinal 
inference mst have been drawn by later Old Testament 
writers, notwithstanding their silence on the subject, in order 


04 Preparation tn the Old 765. [CHAP. 


to account for the depth and earnestness of their sense of sin. 
This assumption cannot be sanctioned. It savours of the 
error of attributing an association of ideas which we, with our 
doctrinal legacy inherited from distant centuries, require to 
make an effort in order to dissolve, to an age in which, so far 
as the scanty evidence seems to indicate, this association had 
not yet been effected. We shall presently see reason to 
believe that, very possibly, such a doctrine of the Fall as 
post-exilic Jewish theology came to acquire was arrived at 
independently of the narrative of Gen. ii—iii., and, instead of 
being deduced from those chapters, was read back into them. 
But the presupposition of a Fall-doctrine, ze. a doctrine 
affirming the moral state and capacities of every individual to 
have been affected by a corruption of the nature which he 
inherits from his first parent, is certainly not logically a 
requisite for a deep sense.of sin, or for a belief in the 
empirical universality of sinfulness amongst mankind. 

It is to be concluded, therefore, that the Old Testament 
books of later date than the Jahvist document supply no 
evidence of a doctrine of the Fall having been extracted out 
of Genesis. And whilst this by no means proves that-noss2-ch- 
doctrine or idea could not, or did not, exist, in ages subse- 
quent to the recognition of the authority of the Jahvist 
writing, yet, taken in connexion with what has already been 
said with regard to the exegesis of the narrative of Genesis 
1i—ili., and with the results of the investigation undertaken in 
the remainder of the present chapter, this negative evidence 
points somewhat strongly towards a negative conclusion. 


* * * * * * 


An alternative Old Testament source of speculation on the 
origin of human sinfulness. 


With the question whether the Paradise-story of Genesis 
was intended by its compiler, or taken by later Old Testa- 
ment writers, to supply an explanation of human depravity, 
is connected that of the nature and meaning of the story 
given (by J, as is usually believed) in Gen. vi. 1-4, which now 


ιν] for a doctrine of the Fall 95 


stands in close union with the Jahvist deluge-story, and for 
which it was evidently intended by the compiler to afford a 
preparation or introduction. For this curious legend of the 
Nephilim has been considered by many modern critics to be 
parallel in meaning to Gen. iii., and to supply an alternative 
hamartigeny or explanation of the origin and universality 
of sin}. 

The linguistic difficulties of the narrative in question are 
so great, the attempts hitherto made to restore the corrupted 
text are so wanting in agreement and in objectivity, and the 
story itself is so sadly mutilated a fragment, that it is easily 
possible to dogmatise too freely on its signification. A few 
statements, however, may be collected with regard to it to 
which a high degree of probability appears to attach. 

The story, both from its archaic language and its naively 
legendary nature, seems to have been taken over from a lower 
form of faith’, and in fact to have been originally intended to 
explain the existence of the giants, heroes (cf. Izdubar), or 
demigods, which many ancient races place as a connecting 
link between divine and human beings, and by which they 
express their belief in the divine ancestry of mankind. 
Similar legends are common to Semite mythology, and there 
is evidence of their existence amongst the Babylonians, Phoe- 
nicians*? and Arabs‘. Perhaps the present mutilated condi- 
tion of the story is due to the fact that the Jahvist compiler 
found much in it that was too repulsive for his taste and too 


1 Budde,’ Urgeschichte; Wellhausen, Prolegomena, E.T. p. 307n.; Schultz, 
Ὁ 7. Theology, E.T. vol. I. p. 30, etc. Clemen (of. cit.) thinks that if this story 
was intended to account for human sin, Gen. iii. could not have been so intended 
by the same compiler. 

7 W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, ed. 2, p. 446, where it is suggested 
that it was a local legend derived from Mount Hermon. The descent of the 
watchers is associated with Mount Hermon in apocalyptic literature. 

3 See esp. Dillmann, Gevesis, E.T. vol. 1. p. 23 ff., where the following 
quotation from Philo Byblus (Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 1. x. 6) is given, which 
illustrates the assertion in the narrative of Genesis with regard to marriage relations 
between gods and mortals: ἀπὸ μητέρων δὲ, φησὶν, ἐχρημάτιζον τῶν τότε γυναικῶν 
ἀναΐδην μισγομένων οἷς ἂν ἐντύχοιεν. 

πον "ὉΠ Π. Ops £44, 5. Pa. 50: 

On the Semitic belief in the kinship of gods and men, see Barton in Yournal 
of Bibl. Literature, Xv. 168 ff. 


96 Preparation tn the Old Test. —|{CHAP. 


unsuitable for his use. ‘Though he has preserved for us the 
connexion of the story with the origin of the Nephilim, well 
known to ancient Israelitish folk-lore, and has not wholly 
purified it, any more than he did the Fall-story, from its 
legendary and polytheistic implications, he has rather used it 
to account for the universal wickedness of mankind, upon 
which the deluge was held to be (as in Babylonian tradition) 
a divine visitation. If, in its earlier form, the legend had as 
much to do with the history of the sons of Elohim as with 
mortals, the Jahvist writer uses it exclusively in the latter 
connexion. He says nothing of a fall of angels, and does 
not imply that the conduct of these Elohim-beings was 
wicked. From its position in the Jahvist history, this story 
would certainly seem to have been incorporated with the 
purpose of explaining the visitation of the deluge, and there- 
fore of assigning a reason for the general depravity of man at 
that particular period. In this case it would appear that the 
Jahvist compiler himself did not intend to teach in Gen. iii. 
that the sin of Adam and Eve concerned any but themselves, 
in the sense that it altered human nature for the worse or 
made human sin more easy. And it is partly because of this 
inference that the passage calls for mention in the present 
chapter. It remains to be added that not only does the story, 
in the context in which it has been placed, bear upon its face, 
more clearly than does that of Gen. iii.’, the pretention to 
furnish the cause of human sinfulness and of its ubiquitous 
diffusion, but the earlier Jewish apocalyptic literature attached 
more importance to it in this connexion than to the story a 
the loss of Paradise*. 


* * ΩΣ * ΩΣ * 


1 It may be observed that the e¢Aos of the legend is similar to that of Gen. iii. 
Man has become, through relations with the sons of Elohim, too powerful for 
Jahveh to endure: therefore the duration of his life is shortened. Cf. Stave, 
Einfluss des Parsismus auf das Fudenthum, where it is said that this story teaches 
that man might have had eternal life if he had not, through false self-advancement, 
overstepped the limits assigned to him. 

* For the subsequent usage of this narrative in apocalyptic writings, see 
Chaps. VIII. and Ix. 

The doctrine of the fall of angels alluded to in more than one New Testament 
book, may either have been deduced from Gen. vi. 1-4, or have been a survival 


ιν] Jor a doctrine of the Fall 97 


Growth, in the Old Testament, of ideas embodied in the 
doctrine of Original Sin. 


The impression which has already been forced upon us 
that the doctrinal interpretation of the Fall-story of Genesis 
only commencea long after the narrative had been reduced to 
written form, will perhaps be further confirmed by a glance at 
the development of certain ideas with regard to human 
sinfulness which prepared the way for the view that Adam’s 
transgression affected his descendants far more profoundly 
than by causing their exclusion from the Paradise which he 
himself at first enjoyed. We shall see that these ideas, which 
are collectively implied or involved in the doctrines of the 
Fall and of Original Sin, exhibit a gradual growth in the 
writings of the Old Testament, and a growth which nowhere 
appears to be moulded by, or to be avowedly connected with, 
a doctrinal interpretation of the story of Paradise. 

It may be mentioned at the outset that already in the 
Jahvist document itself we meet with conceptions of sin which 
form necessary constituents of the doctrines whose early 
history this volume endeavours to trace. We find, in the first 
place, sin personified as a power or agency external to man; 
thus in Gen. iv. 7, a passage which has already been noticed, 
sin is spoken of as ‘couching at the door’ (of the heart?) like 
a ravenous beast. It is also taught, of course, that sin is the 
cause of the sufferings of life: not only is this the main burden 
of the narrative of the third chapter of Genesis, but it is 
implied elsewhere also, as, é.g., in the history of the Deluge. 
Sin, again, is regarded not only as the isolated act, but as 
a state: the state of sinful habit due to the fact, which the 
Jahvist history often illustrates, that one sin leads on naturally 
to other sins. But more than this: we also meet in the 
Jahvist document with the idea that man possesses an evil 
disposition ; and one of the two passages in which this doctrine 


in modified form of the same ancient legend, or have been afterwards read into this 
passage though suggested by Isai. xxiv. 21 (see Davis, Genesis and Semitic Tradt- 
tion, p. 103): but most probably it was mainly derived through apocalyptic 
literature from foreign sources. 


TS 7 


98 Preparation in the Old Test. [ CHAP. 


is expressed implies that such an evil inclination is partly due 
to the constitution which man received at the hand of his 
Maker. For if in Gen. vi. 5 it is said that “the Lord saw 
that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that 
every imagination (yezer) of the thoughts of his heart was only 
evil continually,” implying that the race freely brought upon 
itself, and deserved, the terrible punishment of the Deluge, 
it is nevertheless implied, when in Gen. viii. 21 “the imagina- 
tion (yezer) of man’s heart” is declared to be “evil from his 
youth,” that the possession by man of such ἃ propensity 
towards sin was regarded by Jahveh as a ground for His 
showing mercy and compassion, and for His refraining from 
afterwards visiting the world with a similar destruction. 
These passages just quoted from the Jahvist history are the 
more interesting because in them lies the source of the later 
doctrine of the evil inclination (yezer hara), whose development 
it will be needful subsequently to trace. Meanwhile they are 
only appealed to as evidence that even at so early a period as 
that of the Jahvist writer the conception of an inherent bias 
to evil, if not of an evil nature, had already taken shape. But 
it must be observed that no hint is expressed as to the cause 
of this bias to sin which is regarded as ingrained in man from 
his youth. At least there is certainly no warrant supplied for 
the view that the evil imagination was a consequence of 
Adam’s sin entailed upon his children, or even that it was 
transmitted by physical descent. Oehler’s assertion’, that this 
evil inclination 1s to be taken as a consequence of the Fall, has 
no justification whatever from the Jahvist history. Such 
sinfulness as is there -ascribed to men is neither, to use 
Schultz’s expression, “a hereditary doom” nor something 
characteristic of man’s flesk/y constitution. Save for the slight 
hint in Gen. viii. 21 that the inclination to evil is not wholly 
a matter of man’s choice, sin, with the Jahvist writer, is always 
a voluntary act or a habit resulting from such acts. 

Finally, the Jahvist document teaches something like the 
universality of this state of sinfulness. But it is scarcely the 
absolute universality which would follow from the Fall-story 


1 0.7. Theology, Eng. Tr., vol. I. p. 235. 


ιν] Jor a doctrine of the Fall 99 


if it were to be interpreted in the light of the doctrine of 
Original Sin. In fact there is no reason to assume that, in 
the verses where this idea is found (the same that have 
already been quoted, Gen. vi. 5 and viii. 21), the assertion of 
the universality of sin has a wider application than to the 
particular time to which the historian is referring: the Jahvist 
writing, as a whole, seems, on the contrary, to preclude any 
other inference}. 

A recent writer? has seen in “the prevalent feeling that 
the nation rather than the individual was the subject of sin” 
a probable preparation “for the thought of all mankind being 
involved in the guilt and penalty of Adam and Eve, when 
religious thought came to reflect on the relation to God of 
mankind generally, and not merely of Israel.” This may 
perhaps be the case, notwithstanding the fact that this sense 
of solidarity, or, rather, this deficient sense of individuality, was 
characteristic of a stage of thought which, at the time when 
the national horizon was being exchanged for the universal, 
and speculation as to the cause of human sinfulness was 
probably commencing, was being replaced by the more in- 
dividualistic conception of the connexion between sin and 
σα] developed by Jeremiah and Ezekiel*. The idea of sin 
as common to the family or to the people to which the single 
sinner belonged is, of course, rather a survival of a relatively 
primitive and crude morality than an onward development 
of the conception of sinfulness. The completely individual 
personality emerges late, and only gradually, in the process 
of human thought. Instances of this notion of community, 
or solidarity, in sin occur in passages such as Gen. 1x. 25, 
ἘΝ το ak x ann eX OX IV Aig alt). ili, 20, X XI. 
See NSS Mia see 5 Ines V827 and the 
notion by no means disappears when insistence on the 
responsibilities and rights of the individual begins to find 
expression after the exile’. Dr Clemen thinks that the idea 
of “common sin” which occurs in the prophetic writings 


See above, p. Io. 

Canon Bernard, Art. Si, in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible. 

See Jer. xxxi. 29, 30; Ezek. xviii. 2-4. 

Signs of this tendency appear in Gen. xviii. 23, xix. 15; Exod. xxxil. 33. 


7—-2 


1 
2) 
3 
a 


100 Preparation in the Old Test.  [CHAP. 


is somewhat different from this earlier deficiency of moral 
discrimination; he seems to see in it an inference from the 
belief that all physical evil is of the nature of a punishment, 
and takes it to imply that an-individual’s sin which has 
brought ruin upon a community must be attributed to this 
community as well as to the particular offender, else the 
community could not have been subjected to the punishment. 
But it is difficult to read this implication into most of the 
passages which he collects in order to illustrate the prophetic 
use of the idea of common sin 

It is therefore hard to agree with this writer’s assertion 
that the prophets “no longer believe in the imputation of 
others’ sins.” There are certainly passages which point to 
the existence, in the prophets, of this attitude of mind?; but 
it is as yet only struggling against the dead weight of opposed 
tradition. We shall see later that in Jewish literature of a 
subsequent period the justice of imputation of others’ sins, or 
of community in punishment, was accepted side by side with 
the individualistic conception of guilt and responsibility. 

The narrative of the Fall does not, of course, teach the 
imputation of Adam’s guilt any more than the corruption, 
through his transgression, of the nature derived from him by 
his posterity. It merely implies that the physical evils which 
he brought upon himself as punishments were also visited 
upon his descendants. In this respect the story represents a 
more advanced stage of ethical reflection than many other 
passages in the earlier portions of the Old Testament. Not 
that these definitely teach imputation of guilt, which as a 
formulated belief is of comparatively modern origin; they 
simply fall short of an adequate conception of guilt, due 
to deficient moral feeling with regard to sin. 

The conceptions of sin as absolutely universal, and as 
ingrained in man, conceptions which we have seen to be 
approached, though not fully reached, in the Jahvist history, 


1 Op. cit. S. 46. Some of these passages may be mentioned: Hos. i. 4; 
Isai. vii. 17, xiv. 21; Obad. 10; Jer. xiv. 20, xv. 4, xxii. 28, 30, XxVi. 15, XXxll. 18; 
Lam. v. 7; Deut. v. 9. 

* Besides the verses in Jer. and Ezek. referred to above, see Amos ix. 8, and 
cf. the retrospective passages Deut. vii. 10, xxiv. 16; 2 Kings xiv. 6. 


Iv Jor a doctrine of the Fall IOI 


attained to full development in the later Old Testament 
books. A very important step was thus taken in the way of 
preparation for a thorough-going doctrine of inherited sin- 
fulness of nature. There is a great difference between the 
Jahvist compiler’s treatment of sin, serious as it is, and such 
as we meet with in the Book of Job or in certain of the 
Psalms. It needed the work of the prophets to make men 
realise more fully the moral character of God: it required the 
sufferings of the exile, and the introspectiveness which they 
fostered, to deepen the personal sense of sinfulness, before 
the content of sin came to include the thoughts, the desires 
and emotions; before sin could be looked upon as a disorder 
of the whole being inherent in a man from his birth; and 
before it could be adequately apprehended that there is none 
on earth that is truly sinless in the sight of God. 

The following are the passages of the Old Testament 
which most strongly emphasise the universality of sin: “Shall 
mortal man be just before God? Shall a man be pure before 
his Maker?”; “Who can bring a clean thing out of an 
unclean’? Not one”; “How then can a man be just with 
God? Or how can he be clean that is born of a woman?” 
Job iv. 17 (R.V. margin), xiv. 4, xxv. 4. “Who can say, I 
have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?” Prov. 
xx. 9. “For there is no man that sinneth not,” 1 Kings 
viii. 46, 2 Chron. vi. 36. “For there is not a righteous man 
upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not,” Eccl. vii. 20. 
“Tf thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall 
stand?”; “For in thy sight shall no man living be justified,” 
ἘΝ 3, CXL 2: 

Allusions to sin as inherent in man from birth occur in 
the following passages, in addition to some of the verses just 
cited: “What is man that he should be clean? And he 
which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous? 
Behold, he putteth no trust in his holy ones; yea, the heavens 
are not clean in his sight,’ Job xv. 14, 15. “Behold, I was 
shapen in iniquity ; and in sin did my mother conceive me,’ 
Ps. li. 5. Without assuming that the writer of the passage last 


1 Some scholars consider this sentence to be a gloss. See, e.g., Loisy, Z’£n- 
seignement Biblique, 1892, p. 113,n. 6; Art. Fod in Encyclopaedia Biblica. 


102 Preparation in the Old Test. |CHAP. 


quoted taught that the mode of origin of his existence was 
evil, it is evidently implied that man inherits a tainted nature. 
The idea of sinfulness as an ingrained state, though not 
necessarily as inherent from birth, occurs also in Jer. xvil. 9, 
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is desperately 
sick: who can know it!?” 

Such passages supply abundant evidence that, before the 
later Old Testament books were written, there was a deep 
sense among the Hebrews of sin as both absolutely universal 
in the race and all-pervading in the individual’s human 
nature. But this inherent sinfulness, often spoken of in terms 
which are inapplicable to acquired sinful habit, is nowhere 
definitely traced to its cause or source. Some of the language 
quoted above in reference to it seems to imply that it was 
regarded as hereditary.2 But beyond this implication we 
cannot pierce. It can certainly be said that this sinfulness is 
nowhere traced to Adam and the effects of his fall upon 
human nature collectively. Nor is there the smallest reason 
for suspecting that any such view lay tacitly behind the asser- 
tions of man’s proneness to evil from his birth. A different 
explanation is suggested more than once by the language of 
the Book of Job for the sinfulness of human nature on which 
it insists so strongly* It is that of the creaturely weakness, 
the natural infirmity, of a being such as man, attaching to 
him in virtue of his finiteness and temporariness. This 
frailty of mankind, of which Job frequently speaks, and in 
which he sees a claim upon God’s compassion rather than a 
provocation of His wrath, seems to be regarded as belonging 
to man as such, to man as he was made by God. The writer 
looks upon human nature as corrupt, but not corrupted ; and 
the corruption is appealed to as an apology for his actual 


1 Ps. lviii. 3 is poetic hyperbole, and not an instance to be added here. Nor 
is Isai. xlvili. 8: “‘ transgressor from the womb” probably refers to Gen. xxv. 26; 
ΟΕ ΤΠ πὶ 9: 

5. The explicit belief of later generations in the heredity of sinfulness derived 
from Adam might be moulded on Isai. xlili. 27, 28, “* Thy first father sinned... 
therefore...I will make Jacob a curse, and Israel a reviling.”’ Of course these 
words do not refer to Adam. 

3 We cannot agree with Clemen (0%. cz¢.), in holding that the sinfulness 
asserted in the passages cited above from this book is actual, and not inborn, sin. 


] 
| 
| 


IV | Jor a doctrine of the Fall 103 


sinfulness. That which is born of flesh is flesh, and flesh is 
essentially weak ; as man is born to trouble, so also is he born 
to imperfection. Indeed the angels of heaven, as created and 
finite beings, are imperfect and unclean. 

At this point a few words may be said with regard to the 
further use in the Old Testament of the conception of the 
yeser, which has already been met with in the Jahvist docu- 
ment. There is but a slight development towards the rab- 
binical doctrine of the evil inclination to be traced within the 
pages of the Old Testament itself; but the one step of 
advance which appears to have been made is worthy of notice. 
The phrases of Gen. vi. 5 and viii. 21 are merely repeated or 
ΟΠ (NtOnmexexVilbeg vantexxix..19;) that’ is to say; 
‘imagination’ (yeger) is qualified by the words ‘of the 
thoughts’ or ‘of the thoughts of the heart. But in Deut. 
XXXi. 21 we find the ‘imagination’ spoken of absolutely, 
or without such modifying amplification as is supplied by the 
words ‘of the thoughts.’ Dr Porter’, whose statements are 
here reproduced, has also referred to Isai. xxvi. 3 as a 
probable example of this same usage of yezer, in the sense of 
the disposition or mind. In Ps. ciii. 14, he adds, the word 
may mean ‘frame, as the second clause suggests, but the 
context points to a wider sense, ‘nature, as Wellhausen 
has rendered it. The word thus seems to have gained, in 
Old Testament times, a certain independence, as meaning the 
nature or disposition of man; and this nature could perhaps 
be regarded either “as something which God made or as 
something which man works.” 

In Psalm li. the inherited tendency to sin to which the 
writer confesses is not appealed to in a sense bordering upon 
that of excuse or plea for compassion, but rather as an 
aggravation of personal uncleanness and personal guilt”. 
But here again there is no implication of a belief in the fallen, 
as distinguished from the sinful, condition of human nature. 
Sin is apparently conceived as a hereditary taint, and, so far, 


1 Biblical and Semitic Studies, by members of Yale University, 1901, p. 109. 

* Whether the Psalmist writes of himself, or as a representative Israelite giving 
voice to a national confession, is of no importance here; in any case he expresses 
the conception of inherited and inherent sinfulness as the root of actual sin. 


104 Preparation in the Old Test. |CHAP. 


as ‘original’ sin; but not in the sense that mankind shares 
in the sin, or the consequences of the sin, of its first parent. 
The origin of sinfulness, in the last resort, is left unexplained 
in the Old Testament. 

The degree in which the ecclesiastical doctrines of the 
Fall and of Original Sin are approached within the pages of 
the Old Testament (excluding, of course, the Apocrypha), may 
now be concisely defined. There is no evidence that any 
connexion between human sinfulness and Adam’s transgres- 
‘sion had as yet occurred at all to the Hebrew mind. That 
the ‘divine image’ was lost at the Fall is contrary to the 
implications, if not to express statements, of the Old Testa- 
ment?, It is more than doubtful whether death was as 
yet regarded as caused by Adam’s sin. The serpent is not 
identified, apparently, with Satan; though Satan already 
serves as an expedient for removing from God the responsi- 
bility for human evil which early Hebrew writers did not 
shrink from imputing to Him. So much with regard to the 
use of the Fall-story itself. As for conceptions which are 
essential to that deep sense of pervading sinfulness of which 
the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin may be taken to 
be the mature expression, we have seen that, before the Old 
Testament was completed, Jewish thought had arrived at the 
truth of the absolute universality of human sinfulness, and 
had come to regard it as a state which was inherent in man 
and received by him at birth as part of the nature he inherits; 
that no cause for such uncleanness or corruption, where it is 

--- 
regarded as prior to habit established by voluntary acts, is 
definitely assigned, though the writer of Job, at least, seems to 


1 What exactly is meant in the Priestly Code (Gen. i. 26, 27, v. 1, 3, ix. 6) 
by ‘the image of God’ is uncertain; probably no more than writers such 
as Ben Sira or Pseudo-Solomon seem to have associated with the phrase. In 
Ecclus. xvii. 1 ff., the image of God would appear to be identical with supremacy 
over the beasts and with rationality ; the Book of Wisdom asserts these properties 
of man, though not expressly in connexion with the divine image (ix. 2, 3; cf. 
Ps. viil. 6), which, in il. 23, it associates with immortality of the soul. It is not 
until we come to the apocalyptic books and the rabbinic writings that the image 
of God is taken to include more remarkable endowments; and the identification 
of it with moral excellences was due to Christian teachers. 

2 See below, p. 117 f. 


ιν] Jor a doctrine of the Fall 105 


have seen its source in the necessary and normal infirmity 


which pertains to the finite creature. The identification of this 
inherent tendency to sin with a corruption of human nature 
wrought once and for all by Adam, and /hence naturally 
engendered in his posterity, alone is wanting of the con- | 
stituent elements whose union is essential to the later doctrine 
of the Fall. The increasing sense of individual moral 
personality, which is conspicuous in certain later books of 
the Old Testament, is a tendency which might be supposed 
to make against the acquisition of such a doctrine of solidarity 
in a ‘first father’ of the race, or in the effects of his 
transgression ; but indirectly it aided the formation of such a 
view, by adding point to the individual’s sense of personal sin, 
and so fertilising the soil in which the doctrine of hereditary 
acquired corruption has its root. 


(ὈΡΓΆΣ 


THE TEACHING OF ECCLESIASTICUS ON SIN 
AND THE FALL. 


Introductory 


THE last chapter was largely concerned with the question, 
whether there are signs, in the books included within the Old 
Testament canon, of any exegetical use of the Fall-story such 
as would imply that this narrative was held by any Old 
Testament writer to be an authoritative source of a doctrine 
of human nature and human sinfulness. So far as the 
evidence went, it was seen to point to the conclusion that 
the narrative of Paradise, though undoubtedly taught and 
reverenced as part of the ‘first canon, did not as yet exert 
any influence upon the development of the doctrine of sin in 
what are called Old Testament times. We have now to pass 
on to later Jewish writings which found no place in the 
canon. 

This literature may conveniently be divided, for our 
purpose, into three classes: (i) Alexandrian, (ii) Rabbinical, 
and (iii) Pseudepigraphic. These groups of writings will 
subsequently be examined in the order mentioned above, 
which is also the order of increasing importance in respect of 
similarity of spirit to that of the first Christian writers, and of 
influence upon the earliest Christian thought. 

But before we discuss the development of the doctrine of 
the Fall as it is traceable in these three classes of literature, 
another early non-canonical Jewish book calls for full 
consideration, in virtue’ of its representing a definite stage in 
the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament, 


CH. Vv] The teaching of Ecclestasticus 107 


on the one hand, and also to two of the three classes of 
literature which have just been enumerated, on the other. 

This is the book Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Ben 
Sira ; and its examination will occupy the remainder of the 
present chapter. 


Eccclestasticus. 


The book Ecclesiasticus occupies a place of considerable 
importance in the history of Jewish thought, and especially in 
the history of the doctrine of the Fall, notwithstanding the 
fact that its treatment of this subject is relatively slight and 
only incidental. There are two reasons for regarding the 
writing as thus important to the student of the growth of the 
doctrine of the Fall. In the first place, we derive from it the «γ᾽ 
| most_ancient extant reference, for anything like doctrinal 
: purposes, to the narrative of Genesis relating to the first sin 
| and its consequences for mankind. -Ecclesiasticus, in fact, 


| presents us with the fir: first appearance of a_partialexevesis of 
that story hat_story’. In the second place, the book has an interesting 
relation, as has already been stated, both to the Old ΤΈΩΣ 
ment, on the one hand, and to the Jewish literature which is 
to be dealt with in the succeeding chapters. The Wisdom of 
Ben Sira, in fact, is a most valuable, and a unique connecting- 
link. It has indeed no affinity, and no connexion of any 
kind, with the pseudepigraphic writings ; although these must 
have already begun to be current in Ben Sira’s day. And 
excluding this kind of literature, of which we certainly 
possess little, if we can be sure that we possess any, that is of 
similar antiquity to the book Ecclesiasticus, the latter work is 
the only one which unquestionably reflects light upon the 
Palestinian thought of its time concerning the origin of sin 
and death in Adam. The Talmud and Targums perhaps 
imply that exegesis was actively pursued as early as Ben 
Sira’s day, and may possibly contain, in spite of all the loss 
which attended their compilation, teaching that was then 
current. But such teaching cannot be isolated from the 


1 Tt will be seen in Chap. VIII. that the groundwork of the Book of Enoch, 
probably older than Ecclus., alludes to the story of Adam’s fall; but it extracts 
no general doctrine of sin from it. 


108 7016 teaching of Ecclestasticus [(ΗΑΡ. 


accretions of later periods. The sayings in that part of 
Pirke Aboth, even, which deals with cosmological and 
philosophical rather than with moral questions, are anony- 
mous. And this’ fact of the uniqueness of the witness of 
Ecclesiasticus to the Palestinian thought of its time, on the 
subject with which we are concerned, remains true whether 
the book be regarded as a product of the later half of the 
second century B.C., which is the view now generally adopted 
in England and in Germany, or whether, as is occasionally 
maintained, it dates from the end or the middle of the third: 
whether it be a work contemporary with Ecclesiastes, or even 
with Wisdom, or, as is more probable, with neither. 

As regards the relation of Ecclesiasticus to the Old 
Testament, it may be considered as a continuation of that 
element in it which is usually known as the Wisdom-literature. 
Ben Sira fully respects the authority and inspiration of the 
books which first came to be recognised as canonical, 
especially the Law. His exceedingly numerous quotations 
from the Scriptures confirm his grandson’s statement that he 
had ‘much given himself’ to their study. Fritzsche, indeed, 
speaks of him as a pure Old Testament type. And sucha 
designation for him, as a man, requires but slight qualification 
to be appropriate to him as an author. “The literary 
ambition of that age did not, as the Wisdom of Ben Sira 
clearly shows, presume either to write Scripture or even to 
add to it; it was content with studying the inspired documents 
of the past, interpreting them and imitating them?” This, 
however, does not preclude the writer’s venturing to supple- 
ment the Wisdom-literature, whose canonicity was not fixed 
in his day. Still, except with regard to matters of practical 
wisdom and morals, he does not allow himself much liberty 
of thought, though he was probably conscious of the inade- 
quacy of his inherited theology to solve all the problems 
which presented themselves to his highly educated and 
observant mind. Ben Sira is preeminently conservative. 
He disparages ventures of speculative thought in contrast 


 Kurzgefasstes exeget. Handbuch zu den Apokryphen (1859), Bd. ν., S. xxxiii. 
? Dr Schechter, in his and Dr Taylor’s Wisdom of Ben Sira, 1899, p. 32. 


ν] on Sin and the Fall 109g 


with reliance upon authority'; and he claims to be a collector, 
at least as much as an original thinker, with regard to the 
practical instructions which represent the main purpose of his 
book?. 

For these reasons Ben Sira is to be regarded as a reliable 
exponent of such theological teaching as was orthodox in his 
day, and therefore as a useful guide to the views of his time, 
at least in the circle to which he belonged. 

To define that circle, in so far as is possible, is to sketch 
the relations of the author of Ecclesiasticus to the later stand- 
point of each of the kinds of Jewish literature about to be 
discussed. 

Ben Sira, says a recent writer, ““seems to have been a 
Palestinian sage, a philosophical observer of life, an ardent 
Israelite and devoted lover of the Torah, but probably neither 
a priest nor a sofer (scribe), unless that term be understood 
in a very wide sense. He had too wide a circle of interests 
to be easily identified with either of those classes, though he 
was in close relation with them both*” He gives great 
prominence to the Law, but he is far removed from the later 
Pharisee. And if he “wrote like a rabbi‘, the statement 
must be taken to imply that he manifests, in a very elemen- 
tary degree, the tendencies of thought and method which 
characterised the later writers of the Talmud, rather than 
that he exhibits them in their maturity. The element of 
haggada® introduced into his work is comparatively slight; 


Δ iii, 21-24. 

τ τε τττ Τῷ: 

Some authorities have considered B. Sira to be by no means an original 
writer, and have regarded his work as but a compilation from already existing 
sources: e.g. Bretschneider, Lzber Fesu Siractdae Graece; Ewald, Geschichte des 
Volks Israel, τν. 342 ff.; Ryssel, Kautzsch’s Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen, 1. 
239. Schiirer (see last reference) maintains the opposite view, with most other 
writers. 

3 Prof. Toy, Art. Zeclestasticus in Encyclopaedia Brblica. 

4 Schechter, of. cr¢., p. 32. 

5 Some readers may perhaps desire a definition of this term, frequently to be 
used in later chapters; the following one is therefore supplied from an article in 
the Few. Quart. Review, τν., by Bacher: haggada is ‘‘the exegetical elaboration 
of the contents of a verse, the evolution of new ideas based upon the interpretation 
of the biblical text.” See further, note 1, p. 145. 


110 ©The teaching of Ecclesiasticus  |CHAP. 


his exegesis freely adapts, but does not venture much beyond, 
the words of Scripture. Ben Sira represents the common 
root whence were afterwards differentiated the standpoints 
of the Pharisaic rabbi and of the Sadducee; and perhaps 
there is some approach to that of the Alexandrian school. 
For though he betrays no trace of Alexandrian influence}, 
and has no interest in Greek philosophical thought, he shows 
signs of having absorbed general Hellenic culture, and his 
horizon is by no means limited by his native Scriptures*. 

Thus Ben Sira neither breaks with the traditional religion 
of the past nor adopts any considerable doctrinal innovations 
from without. The direct contact of his country, at a previous 
time, with Persia, appears to have produced no effect upon 
his thought. Indeed he is peculiarly chary of beliefs in a 
future life, and in angels and demons; and, if a particular 
passage in his book has been correctly interpreted by certain 
authorities, he appears to adopt an attitude which is pro- 
testant, if not rationalistic, towards the new development 
in doctrine which would regard Satan as the personal tempter 
of man’. 

It will be obvious, for the reasons which have now been 
given, that the book Ecclesiasticus occupies a position of very 
considerable importance for the student of the growth of 
Jewish doctrine, representing, as it does, a period from which 
we have few literary remains. It has therefore been thought 
worth while to sketch its historical background here with 
some fulness, although the amount of light which the book 


1 The signs of Alexandrian influence formerly adduced by Gfrérer, Dahne, 
etc., are now generally regarded as based upon faulty interpretation; see Drummond, 
Philo Fudaeus, vol. 1. 

2 Cf. Montefiore, Wibdert Lectures, pp. 380 ff.; Nestle, Art. Sirach in Hastings’ 
Dict. of the Bible ; Toy, loc. cit., especially the remarks which this writer makes on 
the personified wisdom of Ecclus. The more direct Hellenic influences which have 
been said by some to be traceable in this book have sometimes been regarded as 
due to its translator; see Edersheim in the Sfeaker’s Commentary on Ecclus.; Bois, 
Les Origines de la Philosophie Judéo- Alexandrine, p. 172; Herriot, Philon le Fuif. 
One such supposed instance of Hellenising by the younger B. Sira has been 
disproved since the recovery of the Hebrew fragments: see Tyler, Jew. Quart. 
Review, Apr. 1900, pp. 555 ff. 

3 See below, p. 115. 


ν] on Sin and the Fall ΤΠ 


actually throws upon the problems of sin and evil is not 
relatively large. 


Ben Stra’s teaching as to Sin. 


Ben Sira’s view of sin in general does not involve the 
deeper and more inward conceptions which have been de- 
scribed as existing in some of the later canonical writings 
of the Old Testament: eg. Job, Ps. li, and such passages 
imeem COPNCisu ds |clLaex« xls spn Π ΖΕ (XXXYV1. 20. in 
consists, according to him, in the breach of explicit law 
rather than in an inward disposition expressed by the aims 
and affections of the man’. His recognition of the univer- 
sality of sin, again, finds no deeper expression than that “all 
are worthy of punishment?” Sin is not conceived as an 
inherent spiritual disease clinging to man from his birth; 
and it is scarcely regarded as an external power. Such 
‘moral solidarity’ as he incidentally predicates of the race 
consists only in the punishableness of the children for their 
parents’ sins’, and in the influence of example*. Ben Sira’s 
attitude generally speaking is individualistic: and he magnifies 
personal freedom and responsibility, as will be seen from 
certain passages presently to be discussed. These facts lead 
us not to expect in Ecclesiasticus a very thorough-going 
doctrine of the Fall, so far as moral consequences are con- 
cerned. A friorz considerations, however, must not prejudice 
the empirical examination of the statement, such as it 15, 
which deals directly with the point in question. 

This statement is to be found in xxv. 24°, which affords 
a convenient starting-point for the study of Ben Sira’s views 
as to the historical origin of sin’ So long as only the Greek 
and Syriac versions were accessible, two interpretations of 


1 But cf. the doctrine of the yezer, below, p. 114 ff. 
= Vill. 5. 
= °xXxili. 24, xlvii./20. 

4 xli. 5. This passage mzght mean more, but there is no reason to believe 
that it does. 

> Verses are quoted according to the English Revised Version of the Apocrypha 

6 ἀπὸ γυναικὸς ἀρχὴ ἁμαρτίας, 

καὶ δι᾽ αὐτὴν ἀποθνήσκομεν πάντες. 


112 The teaching of Ecclestasticus  [CHAP. 


this verse were equally possible, owing to the ambiguity of 
ἀρχή, which elsewhere in the book (e.g. x. 12, 13) undoubtedly 
bears the sense of ‘cause’ in addition to its primary meaning 
of ‘beginning.’ For this reason Bruch was led to think that 
the former sense was predominant here, unless indeed Ben 
Sira had not distinguished the two alternatives in his own 
mind. Bretschneider! translated ἀρχή by causa for other 
reasons. Edersheim, on the contrary, guided by the Syriac, 
which he translates ‘from the woman began sins®,’ concluded 
that the Hebrew had the equivalent of that rendering and 
denied the implication in this verse of any doctrine approaching 
that of Original Sin. Fritzsche* adopted the same interpre- 
tation, believing that the original for ἀρχή did not contain 
the sense of causa or origo. Quite recently the original 
Hebrew of the passage has been recovered*, and the word 
represented by ἀρχή proves to be ¢efzllah, not reshith; ‘be- 
sinning’ is therefore to have a predominantly temporal sense. 
Still it has to be borne in mind that when, in the second 
clause of the verse, the writer passes to the thought of death, 
to the relation of Eve’s sin to our universal mortality, a causal 
connexion is distinctly asserted. The use of ¢ehz//ah in the 
former clause does not perhaps, in itself, preclude the thought 
of such connexion, in the case of sin also, having presented 
itself to Ben Sira’s mind; but it certainly does not suggest 
any such connexion. This verse may still be pronounced 
ambiguous as a guide to its writer’s teaching on the introduc- 
tion of general sinfulness, and its meaning must be sought by 
comparison with other passages. It would indeed be venturing 
further than was his wont beyond the letter of the scriptural 
narrative which he had in his mind, and also stating a deeper 
view of the first transgression than we should naturally have 
expected, if Ben Sira intended to imply here that Eve's 
transgression was the cause or source of human sinfulness. 
If one presses the literal meaning of the former clause of the 


' Op. cit., tn loc. 

2 Speaker's Commentary, in loc. 

a Op, Ci ΣΤ: 

See Jew. Quart. Review, April, 1900. It is assumed here that the recovered 
Hebrew is not a retranslation. 


4 


ν] on Sin and the Fall 113 


verse so that an antithesis is produced between ἀρχή and 
de αὐτήν, one does but extract a doctrinal result thoroughly 
in keeping with what later Jewish literature, most akin to 
Ecclesiasticus, would lead us naturally to expect. 

Fortunately we can resort to a more objective method 
of deciding this question than by reliance on such con- 
siderations as these, relevant though they may be. It may 
legitimately be argued that the doctrine which would be 
implied in xxv. 244, if ἀχρή bore the sense of causal origin, 
is precluded by the sense of other passages of Ecclesiasticus, 
which contain an incompatible theory of the source of human 
sinfulness. 

These are the passages in which the word yezer was used, 
or has been alleged to have been used, by Ben Sira. On this 
account alone they are important for the study of the history 
of the Jewish doctrine of sin. 

Of these passages we may first consider xvii. I ff. The 
writer speaks here of man’s creation by God, his mortality, 
and his endowment with the divine image, with which dominion 
over the animals is either identified or closely associated. He 
then adds’: “counsel...gave he them to understand withal,” 
and continues with the statement that man was endowed with 
the knowledge of wisdom, of good and evil, and received a law 
of life and an everlasting covenant, together with a warning 
against unrighteousness. The word ‘counsel’ (διαβούλιον), 
as Prof. Margoliouth and Dr Taylor? maintain, is probably 
not the equivalent here of yezer, but represents a verb (created), 
which indeed appears in the Syriac. We cannot therefore 
assume that Ben Sira is speaking of man’s original endowment 
with a yeger or inclination ; but the general drift of the whole 
passage is certainly difficult to reconcile with the view that 
Eve’s transgression was the cause of universal human sinful- 
ness. Undiminished freedom, responsibility, and capacity for 
righteousness, seem rather to be distinctly attributed to the 
first and the succeeding generations of mankind. 

The passage in which the original existence of the word 


1 xvii. 6. The R.V. is followed here, which omits several verses. 
* Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, ed. 2, pp. 148, 152. 


Tt 8 


114. The teaching of Ecclesiasticus  |CHAP. 


yezer was first suspected is xv. 14 f.1; and the conjecture of 
Edersheim and others that this term was the equivalent of 
διαβούλιον has been verified. The passage is contained in 
the Cambridge fragments published by Dr Schechter and 
Dr Taylor, in whose work the following translation of the 
Hebrew of verse 14 1s given: | 

“For (Ὁ) God created man from the beginning ; 

And put him into the hand of him that would spoil him ; 

And gave him into the hand of his inclination*.” 

Edersheim* and Ryssel* both assert that Ben Sira used 
yezer here in its earlier (biblical) sense of disposition or mind, 
and not in its later application to either the good or the evil 
impulse in man. Prof. Margoliouth® believes. that in Ecclesi- 
asticus yezer is used in its “technical sense” ; but what 15 its 
technical sense is not made plain. The relation of B. Sira’s 
general conception of the yeser to those implied in the biblical 
and rabbinical uses of it respectively is a matter of consider- 
able importance, and must be discovered by an examination 
of the various passages in which the word occurs. In the 


LoxVeLt 4 αὐτὸς ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐποίησεν ἄνθρωπον, 
καὶ ἀφῆκεν αὐτὸν ἐν χειρὶ διαβουλίου αὐτοῦ. 
I5 ἐὰν θέλῃς, συντηρήσεις ἐντολάς, 


καὶ πίστιν ποίησαι εὐδοκίας. 

3 Dr Schechter suggests that the third clause of this verse, which appears in 
the Greek, is a doublet of the second, which is represented by the Syriac (p. 51). 
I. Abrahams considers these doublets, which are frequent in the Cairo fragments, 
to be distinct ancient recensions of the Heb. (Jew. Quart. Review, Oct. 1899, 
p. 175; cf. the opinion of the Rev. G. Margoliouth, p. 2 of the same number). 
He thinks, however, that some of them are due to B. Sira himself, and result 
from his imitation of Prov. (cf. Tyler, 7. Q@. &. April 1g00, p. 555 ff.). M. Lévi, 
who supports (or supported?) the view that the recovered Heb. is a retransla- 
tion, considers them to be corresponding renderings of the Greek and Syriac. 
Dr Schechter (/. Q. #. April 1900, p. 459) also has important remarks upon 
the subject. 

Dr Porter, of. czt. p. 138, writing on this verse, says: ‘‘If the 2nd and 3rd lines 
...are doublets, the Gk decides in favour of the 3rd as more original; since the 
2nd line is wanting in the Gk, we should not, perhaps, put weight upon the per- 
sonification of the yezer which it implies. It is quite possible, however, that the 
line was omitted by the translator, or by later Christian scribes, as suggesting 
too much intention on the part of God that man should fall into sin.” 

3 Speaker's Commentary on Ecclus., in loc. 

4 Kautzsch’s Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen, in loc. 

> Expositor, 4th Series, I. 297 ff. 


ν] on Sin and the Fall ΤΕ 


verse at present before us the yezer is a disposition implanted 
in man by God, from which, evidently, there proceeds the 
solicitation to sin. It is therefore spoken of as man’s spoiler. 
It is something, however, which man is not compelled to 
follow ; the commandments of God may be kept in spite of 
it, and no one can say “ my transgression was of God!.” It is 
not identical with free-will, and διαβούλιον is an inaccurate 
rendering of its sense; it is rather one of two alternative 
powers—the other emerges in another passage—between 
which man’s free-will has to choose for the determination 
of his conduct. This would seem to imply considerable 
development towards the rabbinical conception of the yezer 
hara. 

In xxi. 27 the evil inclination seems to be in the writer’s 
mind, where he says “When the ungodly curseth Satan he 
curseth his own soul?” If this translation be correct, the 
yezer may possibly have been already identified by contem- 
porary scribes with Satan; and Ben Sira, resenting this 
innovation in doctrine, may here perhaps be rationalising 
Satan into the yeser and denying his existence as a personal 
tempter. But however this may be, and whatever the exact 
stage to which the doctrine of the yezer may have been carried 
in Ben Sira’s day, this verse may be appealed to in favour of 

1 vy. 15, 11; see the whole context. 

2 LXX. ἐν τῷ καταρᾶσθαι ἀσεβῆ τὸν σατανᾷ αὐτὸς καταρᾶται Thy ἑαυτοῦ ψυχήν. 
The Syriac, according to Lagarde’s critically edited text, runs thus: ‘when the 
fool curseth him that did not sin against him he is cursing his own soul.’ 
Mr J. H. A. Hart informs me that a very slight alteration here would give 
‘him that made him to sin’ instead of ‘him that did not sin against him,’ and thus 
emends the text. The sense then becomes similar to that of the Greek. Edersheim 
(7 Joc.) believed that the Syriac avoided the plain meaning by a paraphrase; Ryssel 
(21 oc.) objects to seeing a motive in the Syriac, and thinks the Greek has a wrong 
translation, embodying more advanced thought. Of the older authorities, Bret- 
schneider translated τὸν σατανᾶ by the word calumntator, which Fritzsche rejected, 
at the same time not accepting ‘Satan.’ The latter rendering was defended by 
Edersheim, and Cheyne inclines to it, quoting asa parallel in meaning Ps. xxxvi. I, 
R.V. margin (Exfosttor, series X1., p. 346). The Heb. of the verse, if it should 
be recovered, would be interesting. 

. See Taylor, of. czt., p. 147, note 20, for a quotation from Maimonides on the 
(later) identity of the evil inclination, the adversary (Satan), and the angel of death; 
also, p. 130, where it is stated that the yezer is called ‘enemy,’ amongst other 


names, in Sukkah, 52 a—b. Edersheim also refers to Baba Bathra, τό a, for the 
identification of Satan with the evil yezer. 


8—z2 


116 The teaching of Ecclestasticus  |CHAP. 


the main contention with which the present investigation is 
concerned ; namely, it emphasises man’s responsibility for his 
own sin, and so far militates against the view that Ben Sira 
held any doctrine approaching that of original sin. 

In xxi. 11 (LXX.) occurs the sentence, ὁ φυλάσσων νόμον 
κατακρατεῖ τοῦ ἐννοήματος αὐτοῦ. The Syriac, however, reads: 
“he that keepeth the law constrains (oppresses) his yezer.” 
This most probably represents the original, which has not 
yet been recovered. In that case, “it is unmistakably the 
so-called rabbinical sense of the term (yezer) that meets us 
here’.” The idea of the torah as given for an antidote to 
the evil inclination occurs somewhat frequently in rabbinical 
literature, as does also the expression ‘constrains’ or ‘masters 
his yezer.’ 

There remains another passage whose original probably 
contained the word yezer. In xxxvii. 3 a, we read: “0 evil in- 
clination (ἐνθύμημα, probably = yezer), why wast thou created?” 
(ἐνεκτίσθης for ἐνεκυλίσθης, by following Syr. and Lat.). The 
Greek gives a better text here than the Syriac, which reads: 
“Enemy and evil, to what end were they created ?” 

These passages have been collected together because they 
show that, whether or not Ben Sira knew of a doctrine of two 
yesers*, or of the evil imagination as personified into an 
external power, he certainly believed an evil disposition to 
have been inherent in man from the first, and regarded this 
inclination, which the individual can still coerce by free-will 
and devotion to the law, as the source of his sinfulness. But 
so far from any signs of Ben Sira considering this evil nature 
to have been derived from our first parents’ sin, more than one 
passage which has been mentioned above distinctly implies 


SSP OMter, 08. ΟΣ palate 

On the same page Dr Porter discusses the meaning of yezer in xxvii. 6, where 
it had not been suspected. He inclines to the view that the word means there what 
it does in the passages previously discussed. The Syriac of xvii. 31 (see below, 
p- 117, ἢ. 2) also contains yezev, but its existence in the Hebrew is doubtful. 

2 Analogy with the Zestament of Aser (1. and v.) and similar passages has 
suggested the tacit implication of the two yezers in Ecclus. xxxjil. 14, 15, taken 
together with the preceding context. This, however, is only a conjecture. 


Ben Sira invariably speaks of man as possessing but one inclination, identified 
with evil. 


ν] on Sin and the Fall 117 


that he held it to have been originally implanted in man by 
God!. 

We therefore conclude that Ben Sira was the precursor of 
the talmudic teaching as to the Fall rather than that of the 
more serious pseudepigraphic literature of the first century 
A.D. Although he holds that sin entered into the world as an 
actuality in Eve’s transgression, and also recognises that all 
men are sinners (viii. 5) and are descended from Adam 
(xvii. 1), he nevertheless implies that the Fall brought no 
moral incapacity in its train, no inherited corruption of nature, 
to diminish man’s power of self-determination. If any excuse 
is offered for human depravity, it is that of our natural and 
essential frailty referred to in xvii. 30—32? and elsewhere; 
and its ultimate source, or rather its ground in so far as man’s 
will is excepted, is God, not Adam’s self-perversion®. 


Ben Stra’s teaching as to the introduction of death. 


Before we examine the few passages in Ecclesiasticus which 
deal with the subject of man’s mortality, it will be well to 
glance at the Old Testament teaching on the point. 

If it be assumed that the compiler of Gen. 1i.—iii. intended 
to teach that man, so long as he did not sin, possessed the 
capacity for deathless existence, it is difficult to decide 
whether he must be taken to imply that human death is a 


1 Inasmuch as B. Sira regards man as perfectly enabled to master his yezer, 

he can logically shift the responsibility for sin from God; see xv. τι ff. 

3>The meaning of the last two of these verses, in the Greek, would seem to 
be: ‘‘ Even the sun darkens itself—the brightest thing in the world ; how much 
more, then, frail man!” But the text is corrupt, and the writer’s meaning doubtful. 
The Syriac has (v. 31) ‘‘ When the sun passeth away from the day, also (¢.e. then) 
there cometh darkness: so is the son of man that does not tame his nature (yezer), 
for he is flesh and blood.” This rendering was kindly supplied by Mr Hart, who 
states, however, that the Syriac scarcely gives a translation here. 

3 It is noteworthy that Eve is stated in xxv. 24 to have been the first sinner. 
Not only does this faithful following of the letter of Gen. make it less likely that 
B. Sira held any theological doctrine of Original Sin, such as later attached itself 
exclusively to Adam, but this important verse is only introduced casually; the 
context shows that the emphasis is laid, not on the introduction of sin and 
death, but on woman. 


118 The teaching of Ecclesiasticus (CHAP. 


punishment for the transgression of Adam and Eve falling 
not only upon them but also upon their posterity, and that 
man was originally intended to be immortal; or whether he 
held man to be mortal by nature, in virtue of his material 
frame (dust), and originally capable, through access to the 
tree of life while innocent, of indefinitely prolonging his 
existence, and in this sense attaining to immortality. Both 
these views might be said to imply that man was endowed 
with ‘conditional immortality’; and, practically, they are 
identical. To attribute the latter of them to the compiler of 
Gen. ii—iii. would involve the supposition that constant 
recourse would be had to the tree of life to maintain 
existence, and that this tree was not at first forbidden. The 
verse iil. 22, however, seems to imply that once to partake 
of the fruit of the tree of life would confer immortality upon 
man ; and in this case the former of the interpretations seems 
preferable. A third view of the meaning of these chapters 
is possible; viz. that according to which man was made 
essentially mortal, and died in accordance with the course 
of nature, though perhaps prematurely on account of his 
sin. The meaning of the story, on this particular point, 
is not perfectly clear; and considering the non-homogeneity 
of the narrative, that is to say the surviving echoes of earlier 
implication which, superimposed like overtones, obscure the 
fundamental note of the Jahvist’s meaning, this is not un- 
natural. It is the last named view to which the exegesis of 
these chapters given above in Chap. I. naturally leads. It would 
seem that death is presupposed, in Gen. ili. 19 (“for dust thou 
art, etc.”), to be a natural consequence of man’s earthly origin; 
in other words, death was decreed for man from the first. 
Gen. ii. 17 cannot, without violence, be made to contain 
anything but an unfulfilled threat; removal from access to 
the tree of life does but make unconditionally necessary what 
before there was only a supernatural means of avoiding’, 
The verse iii. 22 distinctly implies that immortality was 
never intended for man at all, and that Jahveh, in removing 

1 And if the tree of life alone stood in the earliest narrative, or if the original 


tree shared the properties of both that of life and that of knowledge, this road to 
immortality was originally regarded as closed by divine command. 


Vv] on Sin and the Fall 119g 


man from the possibility of acquiring it, was protecting 
Himself, rather than punishing His creature. The present 
writer is thus in agreement, as to the teaching of Genesis with 
regard to death, with the view expressed by Prof. Charles’. 
And the doctrine thus attributed to Genesis is generally 
admitted to be that of the Old Testament as a whole. 
Death is treated everywhere as the inevitable outcome of 
natural human limitations. Psalmists sometimes speak of 
premature death, never of death in itself, as being a punish- 
ment; it is shortness of life, rather than liability to death, 
which is, in the Old Testament, the wages of sin. In the 
Talmud and the pseudepigraphic books various opinions as 
to the cause of death are found; these will be mentioned, 
however, in their place. 

It may be assumed, then, that there is no indication 
of the view that death is a consequence of our first parents’ 
sin in Hebrew literature of earlier date than Ecclesiasticus ; 
and the teaching of this book must now be examined. 

The only perfectly explicit and unambiguous statement 
on the question is that contained in xxv. 24, a verse which 
has already been examined for its doctrine of the introduc- 
tion of sin. The words καὶ dv αὐτὴν ἀποθνήσκομεν πάντες 
directly assert the sin of Eve to have been the cause of death 
to the race. It is true that the death here spoken of has 
been said to be mors religiosa as opposed to mors naturalis? ; 
but this opinion was surely suggested rather by the supposed 
contradiction®? between this verse and those about to be 
discussed than by the contents of the verse itself. 

An important passage for the estimation of Ben Sira’s 
teaching with regard to death is xiv. 17 6: ἡ yap διαθήκη 
ἀπ᾽ αἰῶνος θανάτῳ ἀποθανῇ. An ambiguity arises here in 
consequence of the possibility of assigning to ἡ διαθήκη ἀπ᾽ 
αἰῶνος either of two meanings: (1) an original, predetermined, 
divine appointment of death to man as belonging to his 
essential nature, or (2) the decree proclaimed to Adam and 
Eve, whereby death. was threatened and denounced as a 


' The Apocalypse of Baruch, XX111. 4, note. 
? Rabiger, Zthice librorum apocr. Vet. Test. 
3 First asserted by Bretschneider, Liber Jesu Siracidae Graece, in loc. 


120 The teaching of Ecclesiasticus |CHAP. 


consequence of their transgression. Some writers have con- 
sidered the former of these meanings to be alone admissible, 
although ἀπ᾽ αἰῶνος is commonly used in the sense of ‘ from 
the beginning’ (of the race) or ‘from of old’ (cf. xvil. 12; xliv. 
2,18; Gen. vi. 4; Tob. iv. 12 &c.). But the original Hebrew 
of this passage, contained in the Cambridge fragments, has 
the common phrase ék ‘dlam (‘perpetual decree’), which 
perhaps describes a law of empirical observation equally well 
as a decree announced by authority. In any case it would 
be perfectly applicable to the pronouncement to Adam and 
Eve that disobedience would be punished by death; and the 
obvious reference to Gen. ii. 17 (lit. ‘expiring they shall 
expire,’ an alteration of ‘dying thou shalt die’), makes this 
interpretation overwhelmingly preferable. It would thus 
seem more probable that in this passage the writer is 
attributing human death to the disobedience of our first 
parents than that he regards it as in accordance with the 
foreordained counsel of God. The latter doctrine is indeed 
found exceptionally in ancient rabbinical writings’, and 
might have been held by Ben Sira; but the context does 
not favour the view that it is intended here. Nor is any 
such teaching mecessari/y contained in the opening verses 
of chap. xvii. The whole passage presumably deals with 
matters of human history, and therefore a reference to God’s 
original counsel is not to be expected. 

The verse xl. 11 has also been regarded as implying the 
doctrine that man was originally intended to be mortal. 
But it may quite as easily allude to the state of things which 
actually holds as to one which might have been originally 
determined. The context here is not such as to lead us to 
expect a universal proposition so much as the statement of 
an empirical fact ; and in any case the passage would seem to 
have too little of the nature of a doctrinal assertion to form 
the basis of an argument”. 

It is thus doubtful whether, as some writers have thought’, 
we are to see two doctrines as to the introduction of death 


1 See Edersheim, Life and Times, &c., 1. p. 166. 
2 xli. 3 is similarly ambiguous. 
3 σι». Prof. Charles, loc. cit. 


ν] on Sin and the Fall 121 


in Ecclesiasticus. The passages which have been taken to 
imply the view that man was originally intended to be mortal 
are scarcely conclusive, on account of their ambiguity. But 
it is by.no means impossible that Ben Sira gives expression 
to divergent views. Whether he entirely breaks with the 
traditional Old Testament view or not, there is no doubt 
that xxv. 24 furnishes the first appearance of such an exegesis 
of Gen. ili. as finds in it an account of a Fall attended with 
universal consequences for the race, other than exclusion 
from Paradise. Ben Sira supplies evidence that, in his day at 
least, the way was being prepared for such an interpretation 
of the Paradise-story as eventually led to the doctrine of 
Original Sin. The result here reached is that the author of 
Ecclesiasticus taught that death was a consequence of the sin 
of the first parents of the race; and that, whilst seeing in this 
transgression the first of the series: of human sins, he suspected 
no causal connexion between the first and the succeeding 
members of that series. In the literally rendered words of 
xxv. 24, the Fall was the cause of death, but only the 
beginning of sin. 


Note. The Book of Tobit, which, though probably not written in 
Palestine, and containing a developed demonology somewhat suggestive 
of Persian influences, has much in common in its thought and ethical 
teaching with Ecclus., may be referred to as strongly emphasising the 
doctrine, illustrated of course in other Jewish writings, that all evil is due 
to sin (ili. 1—6: xiv. 4 ff., 15). The existence of this belief would aid 
the growth of a doctrine of the Fall. 


EAs Rails 


THE PREPARATION FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE 
FALL IN ALEXANDRIAN JUDAISM. 


THE literature of Alexandrian Judaism’, or such of it, 
at least, as was theological in nature, owed its distinctive 
character to the fact that it was intended to bring the teaching 
of the Old Testament into harmony with Greek philosophy, 
and to present that teaching so as to commend it to men 
of Hellenic culture. We should therefore expect its treat- 
ment of the problem of the origin of human sin and death 
to show signs of Hellenic influence and to contain elements 
not represented in the writings of Palestinian Jews. Alex- 
andrian-Jewish literature did not, perhaps, exert much influence 
upon the teaching of the Rabbis of the mishnic and talmudic 
periods, though it contributed somewhat to the shaping of 
subsequent Christian speculation concerning the fall of man. 


The Sibylline Oracles. 


It is probable that, through the unfortunate loss of part 
of Book Il. of the Sibylline Oracles, we have been accidentally 
deprived of a glimpse at the ideas of an Egyptian Jew, prac- 
tically contemporary with the Palestinian Ben Sira, with 
regard to the scriptural narrative of the fall of man. For 
the date of this book of the Oracles, or of at least the greater 


1 On the general features of this literature see Schiirer, Jew7sh People, E. T. 
Div. ii. vol. 11.3 Drummond, PAilo_Judaeus, vol. 1. ; Art. Alexandria in Hastings’ 
Dict. of the Bible; Bois, Sux les origines de la Philosophie Judéo-Alexandrine ; 
Herriot, Phzlon le Juzf; also the older work of Dahne. 


CH. VI] Alexandrian Judaism 123 


part of it, is generally regarded as known with certainty, and 
to be about the middle of the second century B.c. Its opening, 
which appears to be missing, probably dealt with the history 
of the early chapters of Genesis. 

In their present state the Sibylline Oracles are but very 
distantly concerned with our subject. The fragments pre- 
served in Theophilus, ad Aufol. It. 36, called in the editions 
Books I. and 11., emphasise the infirmity of the physical nature 
of man. The flesh is unable to see and know God; error in 
life, such as idolatry, is due to ignorance, but ignorance is in 
turn due to a fault in the will. Neither man’s sensibility nor 
his understanding, therefore, is the source of his evil desires 
and his frailty. 

The date of the composition of these fragments is not so 
definitely assignable as that of Book 111.; but if they should 
be the procemium to that book, which is possible, we cannot 
but regret all the more the loss of the author’s comments on 
the biblical account of the first transgression. 


[The fragments of Aristobulus, who is called, by writers 
who believe in the genuineness of those fragments, the founder 
of the Judaeo-Alexandrian philosophy, preserved in Eusebius, 
Praep. Evang. Vil. 10 and XIII. 12, contain no allusion to the 
origin of sin or of death. ] 


The Book of Wisdom. 


The question of the exact date and the authorship of the 
Book of Wisdom is probably insoluble. There are very strong 
grounds, however, for believing it to be not only independent 
of the writings of Philo, but also prior to them. Like the 
earlier Palestinian work of Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom 
closely follows the Old Testament and uses it as its own 
theological basis. But its interpretation of Scripture is in- 
fluenced by its author’s eclectic use of the teaching of several 
schools of Greek Philosophy. 

This is seen, for instance, in his view of the origin of 
death. If his doctrine is here rightly understood, Pseudo- 
Solomon nowhere states definitely that physzcal death is the 
consequence of Adam’s sin; on the contrary, his Platonic 


124 Doctrine of the Fall [CHAP. 


conception of the soul and its relation to the body makes it 
probable that he did not regard the mortality of mankind as 
an anomaly to be accounted for by introduction from without. 
His teaching in this respect is identical with that οἵ Philo. 
It is true that the writer of Wisdom maintains that death 
was not the original purpose of God for man (i. 13), but that 
it entered into the world by ‘the envy of the devil’ (ii. 23). 
The death, however, of which Pseudo-Solomon thus speaks 
is certainly ethical death, or, in the language of later theology, 
‘second death.’ In his opening chapters, he is attacking the 
practical consequences of the Epicurean doctrine of the 
mortality of the soul for the good and the bad alike. He 
argues that it is only the wicked who actually perish; the 
righteous, after they have ‘seemed to die, really enjoy 
a blessed immortality. Some writers have taken various 
figurative hyperbolisms of Pseudo-Solomon (eg. i. 11 ἀναιρεῖ 
ψυχήν, iii. 16 ἀφανισθήσεται, iv. 19, v. 14) too literally, and 
have seen in them assertions of the physical annihilation of 
the wicked. ‘This view is precluded by the fact that else- 
where ~consciousness, memory and fear are ascribed to these 
souls after their death or destruction. The death, then, which 
the devil is said to have brought into the world, is primarily, 
if not entirely, ethical death. The question remains whether 
‘death’ for the writer of the Book of Wisdom may zuclude 
physical death. In the passage il. 23, 24, it seems impossible 
that physical death can be present to the writer's thought. 
The foregoing context and the antithesis with ili. 1 ff. require 
θάνατος to be used exclusively of spiritual or second death; 
the deprivation, that is, of a blessed immortality. Whether 
it is similarly excluded in the remaining passage (1. 12 ff.*) is 


1 R.V. ‘* Because God created man for incorruption, and made him an image 
of his own proper being; But by the envy of the devil death entered into the 
world, and they that are his portion make trial thereof.” 

᾿ 112 μὴ ζηλοῦτε θάνατον ἐν πλάνῃ ζωῆς ὑμῶν, 

μηδὲ ἐπισπᾶσθε ὄλεθρον ἔργοις χειρῶν ὑμῶν" 
12 a ὅτι ὁ θεὸς θάνατον οὐκ ἐποίησεν, 
ὦ οὐδὲ τέρπεται ἐπ᾽ ἀπωλείᾳ ζώντων" 
13 α ἔκτισεν γὰρ εἰς τὸ εἶναι τὰ πάντα, 
ὁ καὶ σωτήριοι αἱ γενέσεις τοῦ κόσμου, 
ς καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν αὐταῖς φάρμακον ὀλέθρου. 


VI] 22 Alexandrian Judaism 125 


a question more difficult to decide. In this place also, as has 
already been observed, the writer is dealing with the final 
death of the wicked soul. The thought of physical death is 
not therefore directly relevant to his purpose. But the first 
three clauses of the fourteenth verse seem to make it necessary 
to assume that he has so far relaxed concentration upon his 
ruling idea as to have introduced parenthetically, so to speak, 
that of bodily mortality in a subsidiary degree. 

From 130 it may be inferred that ta πάντα in 144 is at 
least as comprehensive as the world of animate beings, and 
from 14 ὁ that it is not more so. Hence εἶναι is equivalent to 
ζῆν, unless, by a further extension of the writer’s tendency to 
endow physical concepts with an ethical sense, it is to be 
regarded as the opposite to male perire! rather than perzre, 
so that the first three clauses of the verse amount to no more 
than an expansion of the thought of Gen. i. 31, “and God saw 
everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.” 
In any case it can only be physical life with which Pseudo- 
Solomon regards creatures other than man to be endowed ; 
indeed, in il. 23, he makes man’s conditional endowment with 
spiritual immortality to be identical with the creation in God’s 
image ascribed to him in the Old Testament, and therefore 
to be the feature distinguishing him from the rest of the 
creation. It is by no means necessary to assume that the 
author of Wisdom, in such passages as these, must needs have 
been confronted with all the consequences of his statements, 
or have been careful clearly and accurately to expound his 
thought, or even have been absolutely consistent with himself. 
Nevertheless, there seems to be no sufficient reason, in this 
case, to assume that in i. 14 he is making any assertion which 
would conflict with the statement made in ii. 23. If this be 
so, all that the passage need be taken to mean is something 
such as this: just as God appointed to man a destiny of 
happy immortality and did not Himself ordain the eternal 
death by which that destiny is forfeited ; so the world of lower 
created things was endowed with the power to perpetuate 
and maintain itself, each thing enjoying its natural span, 
without any inherent element of destruction to disturb the 

1 Osiander, quoted by Grimm, OP.tliey 2 02. 


126 Doctrine of the Fall [ CHAP. 


a 


Creator’s original appointment. It would seem that any 
other explanation of this verse involves the necessity of 
charging Pseudo-Solomon with serious confusion and loose- 
ness of thought; a charge which has indeed been made by 
more than one commentator, but perhaps a little hastily’. 

If the view here adopted be correct, the timely and natural 
death of living things is regarded in this passage as involved 
in their original constitution, and as consistent with their 
having been created εἰς τὸ εἶναι. So far as the lower creatures 
are concerned, the ultimate cause of physical death is therefore 
attributed to God. No direct statement is afforded us of the 
author’s belief with regard to the case of man. But if it be 
legitimate to form an opinion at all as to his position, the 
balance of probability favours the supposition that he held 
that man too was intended to be mortal, and that physical 
death was no introduction ‘of the devil or consequence of 
Adam’s sin. For, in the first place, this view would be the 
more consistent with that which has been deduced above with 
regard to the case of the lower creatures ; secondly, the belief 
might more easily than the opposite view be derived from 
Genesis?; and, lastly, the author’s philosophical opinions 
about the soul and its relation to the body would go far to 
prevent him from regarding physical death as an anomaly 
to be accounted for®. 

Physical or bodily death is, of course, assumed as the 


1 Grimm dismisses a view akin to that advocated above in the following 
words: ‘* Wollte man endlich mit ZLyvan. τὸ εἶναι von dem Bestand und der 
Erhaltung der Gattungen verstehen, so wiirde der Satz keine Anwendung auf 
die Menschheit erleiden, bei welcher es sich kraft des Zusammenhangs um 
das Fortleben der Zzuzelmen handelt.” But it is difficult to see how this verse 
could in any case be introduced otherwise than as an illustration of the general 
principle that the creation, as it left the hand of God, did not contain within 
itself the germ of its own destruction. The verse is valid as an illustration, and 
was hardly intended to be a complete analogy or a major premiss. 

2 See above,'p. 117 fi. 

3 Pseudo-Solomon believed in the preexistence of the soul (vili. 19, 20), in its 
constituting the real self (cf. xv. 11), in its immortality (iii. r—¥4), and in its being, 
during this life, ‘weighed down by a corruptible body’ (ix. 15; cf. iv. 1o—r4). 
Hence it is probable that he would regard physical death, consisting in the 
separation of immortal soul and perishable body, as a good thing, and indeed 
part of God’s original design for man, rather than as an evil introduced from 
without. 


V1] Ud esvady'ian Sudaisrn 127 


inevitable lot of ally dadaintyr © 7, inheritance fren Adar 


is definitely stated; but'ilief@ de‘ac) hint that # a con. 

sequence of ἈΠΕ Σ sin. “Suen “Ene reas 
The interesting question whet hod write jom 

regarded the natural world as riage τ ghee Fall. ontes « 


subjected to vanity in consequence οὗ ity ane be decided’ ~ 
by the exegesis of this same verse. Perhaps the only 
becoming attitude towards the question is one of scepticism. 
Had the verse run (i. 14) “and the generative powers of the 
world were healthsome, and there zwas no poison of destruc- 
tion in them,” the inference would have been suggested that 
Pseudo-Solomon regarded the course of the world as no 
longer what it was intended to be. But in 14 ¢ he uses ἔστιν; 
εἰσίν is therefore to be supplied in the preceding clause. 
Either, then, he is describing the organic world as it actually 
is, in which case he does not recognise a cosmical effect of 
human sin, but regards “ Nature, red in tooth and claw” as 
Nature according to God’s appointment; or else he is repre- 
senting it as it essentially and ideally zs, but as it actually 
only was. The latter meaning seems to be equally possible 
as the former, for, as Grimm points out}, ἐν αὐταῖς may be 
construed either by wmter thnen or by tx thnen, i.e. in their 
essence; it would imply that, if there is an element of 
imperfection in the world, it is accidental and not essential to 
its course. Instead of attempting to decide between the two 
alternatives, one may perhaps venture to doubt whether they 
presented themselves to Pseudo-Solomon’s thought*. 

It may be taken as quite possible, then, for all that is said 
in the Book of Wisdom to the contrary, that its writer did 
not regard the bodily mortality of man as introduced by the 
sin of our first parents and the initiative of the devil; and 
that he did not embrace, if he was aware of, the idea which 
we meet with in St Paul, and in other Jewish writers, of a 
frustration of the original destiny of Nature resulting from 
the same cause. No more definite statements than these, 
perhaps, can be hazarded with reasonable certainty. 

1 OD. cit., S. 62—63. 


2 On the notion that the Fall affected Nature, a belief which had grown up 
before Pseudo-Solomon’s time, see below, Chaps. VII-X. 


128 Doctrine of the’ Fall [ CHAP. 


Retuming now to the. aeatting: obi, 5, that spiritual or 
ternal th entered into’the: Jhurian world through the envy 
of the Weare at! once, Struck with the writer’s advance 
100. ! _otament, history. © It has generally been assumed 

that his. teaching. is;Based upon the narrative of Gen. iii. and 
refers to that context, the devil being identified with the 
serpent of Paradise ; and it has renter been stated that 
we meet here with the earliest instance of that identification’. 
The truth of the last assertion depends upon the date of the 
Apocalypse of Abraham, which as yet remains uncertain, and 
perhaps of that of other pseudepigrapha to be mentioned in 
a later chapter. It is most probable that the devil is here 
identified with the serpent of the Paradise-story, though this 
has been questioned*?. But the ascription of envy to him as 
his motive in ruining man suggests that we here have a fusion 
of the legend of the fallen angels who corrupted the world in 
the age of the deluge with the story of the loss of Paradise,— 
a legend which will subsequently call for detailed notice. 
The ‘developments’ of Old Testament teaching contained in 
this passage are derived from traditions elaborated in Jewish 


1 The assertion of Gritz (Geschichte der Juden, 111. S. 444), that Wisd. ii. 24 
is a Christian interpolation, has perhaps never been taken seriously. 

2 When M. Bois (of. cz¢. pp. 296, 297) questions this, and sees in the devil 
(ch. ii. 24) rather the instigator of Cain than the tempter of Eve, or at any rate 
the equal possibility of either identification, he would seem to overlook the fact 
that Genesis mentions or assumes no such instigator in the former case; and 
that the context here requires ‘death’ to be used in such a sense that it is only 
applicable to the wicked. When he sees, in x. t, 2, the implication that ‘‘le péché 
d’Adam a été sans importance grace a l’intervention de la Sagesse,”” and asserts 
“Le premier pécheur de marque et de portée que cite Pseudo-Salomon dans sa 
revue historique, c’est Cain,” he would seem to be confounding Adam’s personal 
repentance (generally supposed to be meant by Wisdom’s ‘deliverance’ of him 
‘out of his transgression’) with innocuousness of his sin to his descendants, 
which is what Pseudo-Solomon must be taken to have affirmed before the above 
conclusion could be drawn. That Adam’s sin is passed over very lightly in this 
passage (ch. x.) is both true and noteworthy ; and it is probable that when (vy. 4) 
the deluge is represented as having been caused by Cain, the writer has in view 
the legend based on Gen. vi. 1—4, which he interpreted as referring to the 
Cainites, and which, there is reason to believe, had been, until his day, the 
starting-point for a theory as to the cause of the universality of sin upon earth. 
But when M. Bois adds that Cain ‘‘est mis en antithése avec le juste Adam,” he 
seems to be venturing further than is legitimate in expounding Pseudo-Solomon’s 
meaning. 


V1] nm Alexandrian Judaism 120 


literature earlier than the Book of Wisdom. The pronounced 
(relative) dualism implied in its conception of Satan is, 
moreover, an advance upon previous Alexandrian thought}. 
Finally, the writer’s treatment of the serpent is widely 
different from that of Philo, by whom it is allegorised into 
a symbol for temptation arising from the sensuous nature 
(ἡδονή)", and in whose system a personification of what 
is called ‘the principle of evil’ finds no place’. 

It only remains now to inquire whether the Book of 
Wisdom contains any teaching which might be regarded as 
an anticipation of the later doctrine of original sin; any hint 
of transmitted sinfulness of nature derived from the fall of the 
first parents of the race. The question does not involve 
lengthy discussion, inasmuch as the few passages which have 
any bearing upon it are not obscure. 

In viii. 20 Solomon is represerited as having entered into 
a ‘body undefiled’ in consequence of the ‘goodness’ of his 
soul in its previous state of existence (μᾶλλον δὲ ἀγαθὸς av 
ἦλθον εἰς σῶμα ἀμίαντον). Though his body was admittedly 
derived from Adam by natural descent, and inherited the 
mortal nature common to all men (vii. 1), it was nevertheless 
‘undefiled’ when his soul was first united with it. The force 
of the word ἀμίαντον is not diminished by the fact that the 
writer professed the spiritualism characteristic of the Alexan- 
drian school; for he nowhere teaches that the body, or that 


1 See Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen, 2 Aufl. Il. 2. 

The identification of Satan with the serpent of Gen. may be accounted for, like 
the earlier stages in the growth of the conception of Satan, as a natural develop- 
ment of Hebrew demonology determined by the needs of increasingly active 
speculation on theodicy. It is but a small step from the 7d/e assigned to Satan in 
1 Chron. xxi. r. But this particular development, and indeed the later stages of 
Satanology in general, may also have been aided by the stimulus of contact with 
the more highly elaborated beliefs of Persia. See Stave, Linfluss des Parsismus 
auf das Judenthum, S. 246 ff. That Ahriman took the form of a serpent is 
a tradition—one knows not of what antiquity—found in the Bundahesch (see 
ΟΕ 17). 

2 De Mundi Opif. 56. 

3 Dahne (Alex.-Jiid. Religionsphilosophie, τι. S. 172) supposed διάβολος here to 
refer to the serpent as interpreted by Philo, and not to the personal Satan. But 
(1) φθόνῳ διαβόλου would then be meaningless; (2) the conception of Satan as 
a personal tempter of man was known long before the time of Pseudo-Solomon. 


{πὶ 9 


130 Doctrine of the Fall | CHAP. 


matter in general, is essentially or actively evil. If any 
conclusion be drawn, therefore, from the verse in question, it 
must be that Pseudo-Solomon knew of no doctrine of an 
inherent and necessary sinfulness propagated by descent 
from Adam}. Yet though the idea of a universal taint of 
sin, derived from the Fall, is excluded, that of an inborn and 
hereditary sinful tendency in particular peoples is not foreign 
to the Book of Wisdom. The justification for this statement 
is not to be sought in x. 4, where a causal connection is 
asserted between Cain’s crime and the deluge; because the 
evil influence of Cain upon his posterity, dwelt upon in other 
writings of this time, might result solely from force of example 
and intercourse*, and does not require the presupposition of 
inherited viciousness of character. Its proof is rather to be 
derived from xii. 10, 11%, where inborn and transmitted cor- 
ruption, caused by the cursing of their ancestor by Noah‘, is 
unmistakeably attributed to the Canaanites. A commentator 
has seen in this verse an ‘adumbration’ of the doctrine of 
Original Sin®. It would be more accurate to say a ‘preparation 
for it. The possibility, and indeed the actuality, of transmis- 
sion of a depraved nature by physical descent is plainly 
asserted; but the one essential feature of the doctrine of 
Original Sin, derivation of a universal taint from Adam's 
transgression, is altogether wanting. The Book of Wisdom 
shows us, in fact, all the collected materials for the elaboration 
of the doctrine; the introduction from without of evil and 


1 In agreement with this conclusion are the facts (1) that in x. 1 Adam’s 
transgression is mentioned without a hint of entailed effects, and, in so far as 
it concerned himself at least, as remediable; (2) that man’s natural frailty is 
admitted, as well as the necessity of divine assistance for the acquisition of 
wisdom (viii. 21), though no allusion is made to inborn universal sinfulness in 
order to account for it. 

2 Josephus actually adopts this view (Azz/¢, 1. 2, 2). 

3 οὐκ ἀγνοῶν ὅτι πονηρὰ ἡ γένεσις αὐτῶν 

καὶ ἔμφυτος 7 κακία αὐτῶν, 
καὶ ὅτι οὐ μὴ ἀλλαγῇ ὁ λογισμὸς αὐτῶν εἰς τὸν αἰώνα, 
σπέρμα yap ἦν κατηραμένον am’ ἀρχῆς. 

The phrase ἔμφυτος κακία is noteworthy. φύσει in xiii. I seems simply to 
mean ‘unassisted by Wisdom.’ See below, p. 144. 

4 Gen, ix. 25. . 

5 Deane, Zhe Book of Wisdom, in loc. 


VI in Alexandrian Judaisin 131 


(spiritual) death, the transgression of ‘the protoplast,’ the 
local actuality of transmitted viciousness, the universal frailty 
of the race; the data all are here: but they are not yet 
elaborated into a single generalisation. 


Philo. 


The mingling of biblical exegesis with Greek philosophy, 
of which the Wisdom of Solomon and the Look of the Secrets 
of Enoch furnish examples, is developed in Philo into an 
elaborate system of apologetics. But when we speak of 
Philo’s work as a system we do not imply that it presents us 
with a systematic and unified body of theology. In the 
first place, though its object is to present to the educated 
Greek mind an apology for Mosaism, it is almost as much 
concerned with psychology and: ethics as with theology 
proper; and in the second place, it is a collection of very 
heterogeneous, and often inconsistent, elements, entirely lack- 
ing the unity of a theological system in the true sense of that 
term. Of course the instrument by which Philo adapts the 
teaching of the Scriptures, in whose divine inspiration he 
devoutly believed, to Hellenic thought, is the method of 
allegorical interpretation: a method which lay ready to hand, 
inasmuch as it had previously been used both by the Greek 
philosopher and the Jewish exegete. That this apologetic 
expedient should be needed in attempting a rational justifi- 
cation of the biblical history, is itself a matter of interest. It 
implies that the literal interpretation of the early scriptural 
narratives was now as impossible to the philosophically 
educated Alexandrian Jew as that of Greek mythology had 
become, long before, to Xenophanes or Plato. In Philo’s 
exposition, what was originally intended for history is very 
largely resolved into figurative psychology; and it is not 
always easy to estimate how far the events described in the 
Book of Genesis were regarded by him as in any way actual, 
over and above their repesenting, in a symbolical manner, 
universal processes in the life of the human soul. 

We may feel certain, however, that Philo attaches 
historical reality to Adam, and does not mean the account 


Q—2 


132 Doctrine of the Fatt [CHAP. 


which Genesis gives of him to be taken solely as a description 
of the ‘masculine element’ of man’s mind. His treatment of 
the story of the Fall, therefore, has an anthropological, as well 
as a psychological, interest for us. This story is expanded 
and embellished by Philo after the manner of the Palestinian 
haggadist. Indeed Philo used the exegetical methods of the 
rabbinical schools as well as that which he made peculiarly 
his own, and was well acquainted with the traditions of the 
recognised interpreters of the Law. 

Philo’s general anthropology need only be reviewed here 
in so far as it is necessary to the understanding of his lines 
of teaching with regard to the origin and universality of 
human sinfulness. 

Man’s soul is held to consist of two constituents, a rational 
and an irrational part. Of these, the latter is earthly in 
origin, and mortal like the body. The higher element (νοῦς) 
was also earthly and mortal in the first man until God 
breathed into him the breath of life, when it became rational 
and immortal, an image of God, and in fact an emanation 
(ἀπόσπασμα) from Him. ‘This divine element in the rational 
part of the soul is therefore pre-existent ; indeed it belongs 
to the class of incorporeal beings which people the air, some 
of which have descended to earth and assumed a bodily 
nature. Philo does not reconcile his doctrine of emanation, 
which he considered to have been taught by Moses in Gen. 1., 
with that of the pre-existence of the soul as an incorporeal 
being, and its descent into the body, which he derives from 
Plato and reads into Mosaism (Gen. vi. 1-4). As regards the 
cause of the descent of souls, which he identifies with the 
demons of philosophers and the angels of Moses’, he vacillates. 
In De Plant. Nee, 4", part of the choir of souls are assigned 
to human bodies apparently in accordance with a universal 


1 De Gigant. 2, etc. 

2 τὰς μὲν γὰρ εἰσκρίνεσθαι Noyos ἔχει σώμασι θνητοῖς Kal κατά τινας ὡρισμένας 
περιόδους ἀπαλλάττεσθαι πάλιν, τὰς δὲ θειοτέρας κατασκευῆς λαχούσας ἅπαντος ἀλογεῖν 
τοῦ γῆς χωρίου, ἀνωτάτω δ᾽ εἷναι πρὸς αὐτῷ τῷ αἰθέρι τὰς καθαρωτάτας-.... 

[Cohn and Wendland’s text has been used in citations. ] 

In De Confus. Ling. 17, the souls of the wisest and best men, such as Abraham, 


are also represented as having come to earth in a manner, and for a purpose, to 
which no blame attaches. 


VI nm Alexandrian Judaism 1.2 


cosmic law as in the Zimaeus (42 ff.); but in De Somn. and 
De Gigant. 3, such souls voluntarily descended because they 
were filled with a sensuous longing for the corporeal state, 
implying something of the nature of a fall while yet pure 
spirits, as in the Phaedrus. One thus expects in Philo a 
theory of a fall of all souls in a previous state of existence. 
But here his vacillation becomes confusion. He not only 
remains silent as to how purely spiritual beings, whose im- 
peccability he definitely asserts elsewhere’, could become 
ensnared and entangled with the things of sense; but, after 
speaking of evil angels as if they were a class of souls which 
had sinned, he abruptly tells us that these are wicked men 
who have ‘assumed the name of angels*” Nevertheless Philo 
nearly always treats the soul as pre-existent and as not at 
home in the corruptible body. His teaching, or rather one 
side of it, implies and demands a pre-mundane fall; but he 
stops short of definitely propounding such a doctrine as was 
later developed, within the Christian Church, by Origen. 

We turn now to his treatment of the story of the sin of 
Adam and its consequences. In the first place we have to 
set forth Philo’s teaching as to man’s original estate, the 
constitution and qualities of unfallen Adam. 

(z) The scriptural statement that man was made in 
the image of God is of fundamental importance for Philo. 
But it is curiously elaborated in his hands. The similitude 
between man and his Maker is only affirmed with regard to 
the mind‘, It is not asserted of the actual or natural first 
man, but of the generic man® (a conceptual abstraction or 
a Platonic ‘idea’ of mankind), and, still more exclusively, 
only of the ‘true’ or ‘heavenly’ man, the pure νοῦς, free from 
any admixture of sense. This true, or heavenly, man is again 


1 τρύτων τῶν ψυχῶν, αἱ μὲν κατίασιν ἐνδεθησόμεναι σώμασι θνητοῖς, ὅσαι προσγειό- 
τατοι καὶ φιλοσώματοι. 

2 De Confus. Ling. 35: κακίας δὲ ἀμέτοχοι μέν εἰσιν οὗτοι, τὸν ἀκήρατον καὶ 
εὐδαίμονα κλῆρον ἐξ ἀρχῆς λαχοῦσαι καὶ τῷ συμφορῶν ἀνηνύτων οὐκ ἐνδεθεῖσαι χωρίῳ, 
TWMATL.... 

® De Gigant. 4: οὗτοί εἰσιν οἱ πονηροὶ, τὸ ἀγγέλων ὄνομα ὑποδνυόμενοι.... 

+ De Mundi Opificio, 23. 

5. χῤίά, 46. 


134 Doctrine of the Fall [CHAP. 


an ideal or thought, and is said to be an image, not directly of 
God, but of His word or shadow}, the archetype of creation, 
and the instrument (ὄργανον) by which creation was produced. 
Thus the actual Adam only bears the divine image ‘after a 
manner?, or, as is more often asserted, not at all. We may 
notice, by the way, that Adam is said to have been at first 
without the νοῦς which, as we have seen, Philo identifies with 
the ‘breath of life’ imparted to him by the Creator, so that 
the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul is for the time 
lost sight of. Philo indeed finds it hard to serve two masters. 
He is now and again led, by his concern to be faithful to 
Moses, into forgetfulness that he is at the same time a disciple 
of Plato; but more frequently his Hebrew mode of thought 
gives place before his preference for the Greek. 

(0) With regard to the physical excellence of Adam’s 
unfallen state, Philo speaks much in the strain of Palestinian 
haggada, and is a witness to the existence in Alexandria of 
many of the fancies met with in the talmudic writings. The 
tendency to exalt Adam and his first estate, a tendency 
developed very strongly from this time onwards in Jewish, 
and afterwards in Christian, literature, had already manifested 
itself in earlier writings; and it appears to some extent in 
Philo. Thus, at the moment of his appearance, the first man 
found all the requisites of life prepared for him*. Physically, 
he was perfect; being superior to all his descendants as regards 
beauty *, and endowed with gigantic stature’. He had con- 
verse with incorporeal beings, higher than himself, with whom 
he associated in a state of happiness® He was free from 
all disease and affliction’; possessed extraordinary powers of 
perception’, so as to be able to perceive ‘the natures, essences 
and operations which exist in heaven’; and was in enjoyment 
of the most perfect human bliss®. 


1 Leg. Alleg. W1. 31; Quis rer. div. haer. 48; Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 4. 
* οὗ τρόπον τινὰ γενόμενος εἰκών... (Mangey, 11. 440); De Mobilit. 3. 
3 


De Mundi Ofif. 26. “ Ibid, 47. 
> Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 32. 
§ De Mundi Opif. 50. 7 Ibid. 52. 


8 χα, 52; Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 32. 
9 γώ, 


VI] 221 Alexandrian Judaism 135 


(c) When we come to examine Philo’s teaching with 
regard to Adam’s moral condition before his transgression, 
we find that extremely little is said upon the matter. In this 
respect he made no advance upon Rabbinism. Such passages 
as seem to bear upon the point speak of Adam in the alle- 
gorical and psychological sense; that is to say, as a symbol 
for νοῦς as distinguished from αἴσθησις. If they imply any- 
thing at all of actual history, it would only be that, before his 
transgression, the first man was morally neutral, a mixed 
being, neither good nor bad, existing in a state described as 
μέσος or γυμνός". When the means of education into a state 
of virtuousness were offered to him, the good and the evil 
course being presented as alternatives to his choice, he fell 
from his state of innocence?. 

But if Philo says little, directly, of the original state of the 
first individual man, he has much to say with regard to the 
essential moral nature of man in general, as determined by 
the constitution which he has received at the hand of his 
Maker ; and this, of course, amounts to the same thing. His 
teaching in this connexion is, in the main, in agreement with 
that of orthodox Judaism. It will be shown presently that 
he did not hold any such view of the fall of Adam as 
would attribute to it the cause of the sinful tendency of his 
descendants. | 

(2) Nor does he regard physical death as the inherited 
consequence of Adam’s sin in Paradise ; in other words, im- 
mortality, except of the higher part of the soul, was not 
implied in the original or unfallen state of the first earth-born 
man. As to his body and the irrational part of his soul, man 
is ‘mortal by nature’, and related to the rest of the physical 
world. Since bodily existence is not a good, physical death 
is not an evil, thing The death which Adam brought upon 
himself was ethical; it was the death of ‘the soul buried 
in evil,” and consisted rather in the firmer union, than in the 


1 See Leg. Alleg. 1. 30, 11. 15, 16; Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 39, 40. 

2 De Nobilit. 3, etc. 

3 De Mundi Opif. 46 and 51; De Abrahamo, τι. 

4 Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 76: quod nec sensibilis ἰδία vita bona est, neque 
mors mala. 


136 Doctrine of the Fall [ CHAP. 


separation, of soul and body. Physical death is therefore, as 
we should expect in Philo’s system, the necessary consequence 
of corporeality, and can only be a result of a fall if that fall 
occurred in a previous life and be identified with the soul’s 
embodiment. Such death, therefore, is no anomaly in the 
world-order. The good do not really die! and the wicked 
are dead even while they live?. 

The only consequences which Philo attributes to Adam’s 
sin are, therefore, the toils and labours, the loss of the un- 
troubled and happy life in Eden, spoken of in the narrative 
of Genesis*. 

(6) In his account of the first transgression itself, Philo 
usually interprets the serpent to be a figure for sensuous 
pleasure. That ‘the old poisonous and earth-born reptile’ 
spoke with a human voice is not a ‘fabulous invention’ 
but shadows forth an allegorical truth’, That the serpent 
approaches the woman, who then addresses the man, repre- 
sents the appeal of pleasure to the senses prior to the 
influence of the senses over the reason®. Such an interpre- 
tation of the narrative implies that human sin originated 
solely within man himself as constituted by his Maker. Un- 
like Pseudo-Solomon, Philo nowhere introduces the doctrine 
of a personal tempter; in the passage Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 
I. 36 the words dzabolius in ore serpentis of the translation given 
in Aucher’s edition are an unhappy interpolation, and do not 
occur in the Armenian version. 

It remains now to unfold Philo’s views with regard to 
man’s natural constitution and the source of his sinfulness. 


1 Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1.16. Cf. the teaching of Wisdom, above; and see 
also Leg. Alleg. 1. 33. 

> Quaest. et sol. tn Gen. 1. 16, 56; ΤΠ 9. 

3 De Mundi Opif. 60. Cf. De Nobztit. 3 (here mortality is regarded as a result 
of Adam’s sin, but the word is ambiguous in meaning, as will be seen from the 
context). 

4 De Mundi Opif. 56. Cf. Leg. Alleg. 11. 18, 263 Wl. 23. De Agricult. 22; 
Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 31, ete. 

Josephus, for all his dependence on Philo, here adopts the literal view, which 
is also taken in the Book of Judbilees, which, possibly, he knew and followed. 

> In thus making the Fall-story an allegorical account of the general origin of 
the individual’s sin, Philo is perhaps followed by 5. Paul in Rom. vii. g-1r. 


VI] m Alexandrian Judaism 137 


We have seen that, according to one line of his thought, 
man’s bodily or phenomenal nature is due to the yielding of 
his soul, in a previous and purely spiritual existence, to the 
attractions of the sensible world. For any disabilities: con- 
sequent upon such a change, the soul would of course be 
entirely responsible. But though Philo starts to establish 
such a doctrine of man, we have seen that he abruptly 
abandons the attempt, probably because he shrank from 
attributing moral evil to pure spirits. He falls back, for his 
predominant doctrine, upon the Mosaic view of man’s origin, 
according to which both the soul and the body are the direct 
creation of God. But while he does so he is sorely hampered 
by his ineradicable belief that phenomenality is the source 
of moral evil; and he is always most anxious to avoid the 
implication that evil is ultimately traceable to God. He 
would have been spared much trouble and confusion if he 
could have clearly distinguished between the supposition that 
corporeality or phenomenality supplies the possibility for evil 
and the idea that such corporeality involves the necessity of 
evil. 

This, however, he was unable wholly to do; and we con- 
sequently find our exposition of his views again rendered 
difficult by his vacillation. Thus, in some passages, it is 
implied that the bodily nature of man inevitably involves 
sin. The fall of Adam and Eve is in fact said to be a 
necessary outcome of the instability which inheres in things 
material*, But such writing is quite exceptional. Philo’s 
normal and predominant teaching is that the body is that 
part of man to which sin attaches only in the sense that it is 
an impediment to the reason and to the pursuit of wisdom, and 
indeed is to be regarded as a prison or a tomb; sin has 
nevertheless its real seat in the mind or reason*®. Irrational 

1 De Vita Mosts, Wl. 17: ὅτι παντὶ yevynT@...cuudves τὸ ἁμαρτάνειν. De 
Profug. 12: «τὸ κακίας σύμβολον, ἣν ἀεὶ det ζῇν ἐν τῷ θνητῷ γένει wap ἀνθρώποις. 
Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 43: Initium praevaricandi peccandique in legem facit 
imperfecta et prava (natura) femina. See also Leg. Alleg. Il. 14. 

2 De Mundi Opif. 53: Ἐπεὶ δ᾽ οὐδὲν τῶν ἐν γενέσει βέβαιον, τροπὰς δὲ καὶ 
μεταβολὰς ἀναγκαίως τὰ θνητὰ δέχεται, ἐχρῆν καὶ τὸν πρῶτον ἄνθρωπον ἀπολαῦσαί 
τινος κακοπραγίας. 


® Ouaest. ef τοι in Gen. 1. 133 11:12; 18. 
Philo teaches that the passions are ‘‘ bastards and strangers to the mind and 


138 Doctrine of the Fall [ CHAP. 


creatures are incapable of wickedness for the very reason 
that they are irrational. Even the senses cam be pure? 
Man, in fact, according to the general tenour of Philo’s 
anthropology, is a mixed creature, between good and evil. 
And even this seems to necessitate, sometimes, the ascription 
of his creation only in part to God. Man’s mixed nature 
implies a plurality of workers in his making’, which is 
accordingly attributed in part to celestial powers, apparently 
angels. 

Philo’s representation of man’s nature as ‘mixed’ embodies 
practically the same idea as was intended to be conveyed by 
the rabbinical doctrine of the two inclinations. This doctrine 
is not, of course, to be found in his writings; nor have we 
been able to find there any certain proof that the yezer 
doctrine as Ben Sira knew it was adopted by the Alexandrian. 
But as yezer had no Greek equivalent, and no uniform Greek 
rendering, the use of the word is naturally obscure* and the 
presence of the doctrine associated with it is consequently 
difficult to trace in Alexandrian literature. Philo sometimes 
attributes the responsibility for the mixed composition of 
human nature to God*®. This is in keeping with the yezer 


spring from the flesh in which they have been rooted” (Quests ver. div. haer. 54), 
and (z2ézd@. 55) calls them τὰ σύμφυτα κακὰ τοῦ γένους ἡμῶν. In the same context he 
writes: ᾿Ανάγκη yap θνητὸν ὄντα τῷ τῶν παθῶν ἔθνει πιεσθῆναι. But if pressed, he 
would doubtless deny that the passions were anything more than the occasions and 
instruments, as distinguished from the cause proper (the will or reason), of sin. 
The same would apply to S. Paul who speaks of ‘sinful passions’; and indeed the 
language of theology down to the present day has been invariably beset with a 
similar ambiguity and inaccuracy arising from its not having occasion to interrogate 
itself as to what, precisely, its meaning was. 

1 De Confus. Ling. 33; De Mundi Opif. 24. 

2 Quod deterius etc. 47. 

3 De Mundi Opif. 24; De Confus. Ling. 35; De Profug. 13, 14; De Nom. 
Mut. 4. The idea was possibly suggested to Philo by the Zimaeus (41), as 
Drummond says; but it was a common Jewish interpretation of Gen. i. 263; see 
below, p. 149. 

When such difficulties as are mentioned above in the text are not before Philo’s 
mind he can emphatically assert that man was made by God alone, as in De 
Nobilit. 3. 

4 See Porter, of. cz#., pp. 137, 145. 

> De Inebriet. 2; Quis rer. div. haer. 55. Cf. Leg. Alleg. Wl. 23: εὑρήσεις τὸν 
θεὸν πεποιηκότα φύσεις ἐξ ἑαυτῶν ἐπιλήπτους τε καὶ ὑπαιτίους ἐν ψυχῇ Kal ἐν πᾶσι 
σπουδαίας καὶ ἐπαινετάς. 


ν ] 222 Alexandrian Judaism 139 


doctrine; but it involves rather more inconsistency in Philo 
than in Ben Sira and Palestinian writers generally, because of 
his very frequent and emphatic insistence on the fact that 
God is in no way the author or cause of evil!: a principle 
which he maintains in such a way as logically to lapse into 
dualism. Consistently with such aversion to refer evil to 
God, he also banishes evil from the neighbourhood of heaven’. 

But whether Philo teaches that God, or celestial powers, 
or man himself is responsible for human sin, is a matter 
whose importance for our purpose is subsidiary to that of the 
question whether he held that those who came after Adam 
inherited from him a nature in which the evil tendency was 
strengthened by his great transgression. We find no trace of 
such a doctrine in any of Philo’s writings. As an explanation 
of the universality of sinfulness, or of the fact that the race is 
by nature inclined to evil both voluntary and involuntary%, it 
would indeed be superfluous after what is implied in his 
allegorical and psychological interpretation of the Fall, and 
his doctrine of the mixed nature of man, with its inherent 
necessity of imperfection, if not of sin. On the other hand 
there is evidence that he held the opposite view. 

Adam’s sin is apparently regarded as venial or unimpor- 
tant in comparison with Cain’s*, Birth from Adam was still 
‘noble, and more excellent than that of any succeeding 
generation®. Humanity started afresh after the deluge, all 
evil being purged out of the earth®; and Noah himself was 
equal in honour to the first man, nay, to the true or ideal 
incorporeal man’. Though we find Ham spoken of as ‘the 
beginning of misery’ to his posterity’, and the heredity of 


1 e.g. in De decem orac. 33; Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 78, 89, 100; De Cherud.: 
μόνον ἀγαθῶν ἐστὶν ὁ θεὸς αἴτιος, κακοῦ δὲ οὐδενὸς παράπαν. 

5.7.2 Mundi Opif. 60; Leg. Alleg. τ. 18; De Profug. 12, 14. 

3 De Profug. το. 

+ Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 81. The author of Wisdom (chap. x.; see above, 
p- 128) also passes lightly over Adam’s sin and makes much of that of Cain. 

> De Nobilit. 3. 

6 Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 11. 47. 

7 Ibid. 56, but see De Mobilit. 3, with which this passage is inconsistent. 

8 De Nobilit. 3. For the expression cf. ‘beginning of nobleness,’ said of 
Tamar, 7zd7zd. 6. 


140 Doctrine of the Fall [CHAP. 


moral qualities asserted’, we discover no recognition, ex- 
pressed or implied, that Adamr was, in a causal sense, the 
beginning of sin or misery to his descendants. The wicked 
nature of mankind, which is sometimes spoken of?, is in no 
case traced to the sin of the first parents of the race, even 
though sin is inborn in every man*. Though perfect virtue 15 
practically unattainable by anyone endowed with our nature’, 
and no mortal, if he live but for a single day, is free from 
defilement®, yet man’s freedom is unimpaired® ; and so also 15 
such ability as he ever possessed to follow wisdom and 
procure release from wickedness and sorrow’. Indeed all 
men are at first neutral, and, before the reason is developed, 
lie on the border between virtue and vice®. They thus 
resemble Adam in his original state of shamelessness : a state 
expressly attributed by Philo to the soul of an infant, which 
has no share in either virtue or vice’, and even to that of a 
child during the first seven years of its life, which then has a 
pure nature comparable to a ‘tabula rasa”. Thus a bent 
towards evil is developed anew in every individual by contact 
with the evil world. Philo might therefore perfectly well say 
with the writer of the Apocalypse of Baruch, that ‘every man 
is the Adam of his own soul.’ It is true, as we have seen 
above, that Philo regarded the founder of the race as superior 
in many excellences to any of his posterity, and speaks of a 
gradually increasing deterioration of the race. But these 
qualities are physical only; and the very figures by which he 

1 De Confus. Ling. 26. There is a close similarity between Philo’s position 
and that of the author of /Vzsdom; both mention heredity of moral qualities but 
both stop far short of the doctrine of original sin. 

2 De Confus. Ling. 17; De Vita Mosis, 1. 33. 

3 De Vita Mosis, U1. 17 : παντὶ γεννητῷ κἂν σπουδαῖον 7, παρόσον ἦλθεν els 
γένεσιν, συμφυὲς τὸ ἁμαρτάνειν ἐστίν. Cf. Wisdom ΧΙ]. το, ἔμφυτος ἡ κακία ; 
3 Mac. ill. 22, σύμφντος κακοήθεια. 

4 De Nom. Alut.6; De Poenit. 1; De Sacr. Abelis et Catnt, 33, concluding 
sentence. ὃ 

5 De Nom. Mut. 6. 

§ Quod Deus immut. 10. 

7 Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1.87. Cf. Leg. Alleg. Ul. 47. 

8 De Praem. et poen. τι. This is the view of many Palestinian Rabbis, with 
whom Philo’s doctrine has much in common. 

a Lee. A uegollata. 

10 Outs rer. div. haer. 59. Cf. De Cong. quaer. erud. 15. 


VI] 221 Alexandrian Judaism I41 


seeks to illustrate and explain his meaning are such as to 
show that he in no way implies that the degeneracy is due to 
an inherited moral taint or infirmity’. 

It will have been made obvious that the writings of Philo 
contain much in common with the Book of Wisdom with 
reference to ideas preparatory to the doctrines of the Fall and 
Original Sin. Platonic influences have probably been respon- 
sible for the absence, both in Wisdom and in Philo, of the 
doctrine which was now prevalent amongst one group of 
Jewish writers, that death, or at least premature death, was 
a transmitted consequence of Adam’s sin. In this respect 
these Alexandrian writings represent a tendency away from 
the doctrine of the Fall, as compared with other Jewish 
literature. On the other hand they have formulated with 
greater explicitness, perhaps, the idea of the heredity of evil 
propensities?» They never connect this idea with effects of 
Adam’s transgression; but they doubtless prepared the way 
for such a connexion in later times. Another tendency which 
specially characterises Alexandrian thought, shown by Pseudo- 
Solomon, Philo, the author of Zhe Secrets of Enoch and, 
according to Drummond’, by Aristobulus who preceded them 
all, is that of insistence on not referring evil at all to God. 
Palestinian Jewish writings generally refer the origin of evil 
mediately to God; and though they sometimes repudiate any 
such direct ascription of responsibility for Adam's sin to God, 
they seem nevertheless to be, on the whole, distinctly less 
sensitive than the Alexandrians in shrinking from the 
consequences involved. Philo, of course, shows his character- 
istic vacillation on this point; but there can be no doubt that, 
though he now and again lapses, he earnestly strives to 
represent Mosaism as ascribing absolutely no share in the 
evil of the world to its Creator. Indeed he seems only to 
escape from dualism by his inconsistency ; and this dualistic 

1 De Mundi Opif. 49. Later generations are compared to inferior copies of 
sculptors’ or painters’ works, and to the iron rings suspended in series from a 
magnet, in which the strength of attraction diminishes in proportion to the distance 
from the supporting magnet. 

2 See below, p. 144. 


3 Philo Judaeus, 1. 253. Some critics regard the fragments of Aristobulus as 
not genuine. 


142 Doctrine of the fall [ CHAP. 


tendency, noticeable also in the Book of Wisdom, constitutes 
another characteristic of the Alexandrian school. 

In conclusion, what was said of the relation of Wisdom to 
the doctrine of the Fall, applies without exception to the 
writings of Philo. The component ideas of the doctrine are 
all to be found, more or less highly elaborated. But they as 
yet await gathering together into a single generalisation’. 


The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (Slavonte Enoch). 


The teaching of this book with regard to the Fall will be 
fully discussed in one of the chapters on pseudepigraphic 
literature, to which class this work of course belongs. But 
as the book is certainly strongly influenced by Hellenic ideas, 
and was in all probability written in Egypt, its relation to 
Alexandrian thought may be briefly dealt with here. 

The writer of the Slavonic Book of Enoch, in some of his 
teaching as to man and the consequences of the Fall, is rather 
the Jewish apocalyptist than the Alexandrian eclectic. Thus, 
following Ecclesiasticus, by which he seems to have been 
considerably influenced, he differs from Pseudo-Solomon and 
Philo in definitely ascribing physical death to the sin of 
Adam and Eve. In xxx. 16 we read: “And I appointed 
death on account of his sin” ; and, a little further on, “ by his 
wife death came.” It will be seen later that the book, in its 
present form, contains a definite implication of the doctrines 
of the Fall and of inherited sinfulness. In these respects this 
pseudepigraph is out of relation with the Alexandrian litera- 


1 Literature on Phtlo’s anthropology. 


The earlier works of Gfrorer (PAzlo und die Alexand. Theosophie) and Dahne 
(Geschicht. Darstellung der Jiid.-Alex. Religionsphilosophie) are written from pro- 
nounced standpoints now generally abandoned. The best works of more recent 
date are Zeller’s Philosophie der Griechen, 111. ii., Siegfried’s Phzlo von Alexandria, 
and the much fuller PA2/o Judaeuws of J. Drummond. Schiirer has a brief and less 
accurate summary of Philo’s teaching in his A’zstory of the Jewish People, and there 
is a short account of it in Edersheim’s Art. on Philo in Smith and Wace’s Dic- 
tionary of Christian Biography. The works, referred to in this chapter, of Nicolas 
and Bois may also be mentioned; and a valuable discussion of some elements in 
Philo’s anthropology will be found in Weinstein’s Zur Genests der Agada, Theil 11. 


v1] 221. Alexandrian Judaism 143 


ture which has been previously reviewed. But it shows a 
tendency towards the Platonic identification of evil with 
ignorance, and in this sense is more Greek than the procemium 
of the Szbylline Oracles, or the Book of Wisdom. This 
theory of evil is closely associated, in Plato, with that 
philosopher’s doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence ; a belief 
which is shared by the writer of 7he Secrets of Enoch. If 
the soul was originally good, its capacity for evil is naturally 
attributed by such writers to the limitations of the bodily 
nature. Some implication such as this must lie behind the 
author’s language in xxx. 16, where God says to Adam: “1 
knew his nature, he did not know his nature. Therefore his 
ignorance is a woe to him that he should sin....’ The 
ignorance here attributed to Adam is not ignorance of good 
and evil, as to which he is already supposed to have been 
enlightened, but of his own nature with its good and evil 
inclinations?» In xxxi. 7 God is represented as cursing the 
devil, after his seduction of Eve, ‘for his ignorance,’ as if the 
devil’s envy and malignity were also ultimately due to want 
of knowledge. We obviously have, in these passages, a 
Platonic doctrine superimposed somewhat incongruously upon 
the current Jewish teaching with regard to original aptitude 
for sin. The rest of the anthropological doctrine of this book 
has more marked affinities with Palestinian writings presently 
to be examined. 


! xxiii. 5. Note, however, that Bonwetsch translates differently; he has: 
‘alle Seelen sind derettet vor der Welt” (Porter invites reference to Dalman’s Die 
Worte Jesu, S. 104 ff., 245 ff.), where Morfill renders: ‘‘every soul was created 
eternally before the foundation of the world.” Porter, of. cz¢., p. 154 ff., disputes 
many of Charles’ inferences as to the Hellenising tendencies of this apocalypse, 
but does not seem to the present writer entirely to remove all traces of such Greek 
influence. 

* So Charles (Book of the Secrets of Enoch, Morfill and Charles, 77 Joc.); also 
Taylor, Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, 2nd ed. p. 151. Cf., however, Porter, 
op. ctt., Ὁ. 156. 

In xxx. 15 we read of Adam being endowed with freedom of will, and having 
been originally shown ‘‘the two ways, the light and darkness, the good and the 
evil.” This doctrine of the ‘two ways,’ so far as meaning is concerned, is 
obviously related with that of the two yezers, by which it was afterwards generally 
replaced in Jewish literature. 

It must certainly be admitted that, on the whole, the view of sin taken by this 
book is more Jewish than Greek. 


144 Alexandrian Judaism [CHAP. VI 


NOTE. 3 and 4 Maccabees, which should probably be included under 
Alexandrian-Jewish literature, do not supply us with much that is relevant 
to the history of the doctrine of Original Sin. In 3 Mac. ili. 22, we meet 
with the phrase σύμφυτος κακοήθεια, which, taken with the kindred 
expressions ἔμφυτος κακία of Wisd. xii. 10, and συμφυὲς τὸ ἁμαρτάνειν 
ἐστίν οἵ Philo, implies that the notion of zzdorn sinful tendency had 
taken definite shape and was familiarly known amongst Alexandrian- 
Jewish writers. 

In 4. Mac. xvili. 7-8, there is an allusion to a curious Jewish 
interpretation of the temptation of Eve, which will call for notice in 
subsequent chapters ; but there seems to be no evidence for the exist- 
ence there of an approach to the doctrine of orignal sin. The writer 
is largely a Stoic in his ethics. He regards man’s inclinations and 
passions as implanted in him by God (il. 21), yet placed under the august 
rule of the understanding. Wickedness cannot be extirpated, but reason 
can prevent it from overwhelming us (111. 4); for reason is not the 
extirpator but the conqueror of inclination. The book seems to teach 
that we have an inward bias to evil in virtue of our being endowed with 
passions ; but such ‘original sin’ as this we owe to God, and certainly 
not to Adam. 


CLEAR ΡΥ ΤΕ 


THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN IN RABBINICAL 
LITERATURE. 


THE source of information with regard to Jewish opinion 
which is to be examined in the present chapter is that which, 
in contrast with the more popular apocalyptic writings, may be 
called scholastic, orthodox, official and, in one sense, authori- 
tative. It consists of the Targums, Talmud and Midrashim ; 
or, rather, of the haggadic elements in these various depart- 
ments of rabbinic literature’. These writings are generally 
believed to embody teaching which was current, in oral form, 
in rabbinical schools for two centuries or more before it began 
to be reduced to writing. It may therefore be of some value 
as a source of light upon the teaching of the Synagogue at 
the beginning of the Christian era. 

There were perhaps rabbinical schools in the third century 
B.C., and Targums in the second?; certainly there was “a 


1 It may be explained here that the Zargums are paraphrases, more or less 
enlarged, of the Old Testament Scriptures. The A/¢shna is a codification of law, 
intended to supplement and explain the Mosaic law from which it was developed ; 
it practically consists of the results of the discussion of the Rabbis between A.D. 70 
and 200 (the Zannaim), about the latter of which dates the bulk of it is generally 
believed to have been written down. The further discussions to which the A/ishna 
gave rise amongst the Amoraim, or post-mishnic Rabbis, and the explanations and 
additions which were thus accumulated, make up the bulk of the Gemara or 
Talmud, The Afidrashim are a collection of commentaries on the Scriptures. 

The haggadic elements of these various works are personal sayings, of the 
nature of exposition or illustration, and often purely imaginative ; while the 
halachic elements, on the contrary, were more fixed and more authoritative. For 
fuller and more precise information see Edersheim, Life and Times of the Messiah, 
Schiirer’s A7story of the Jewish People, and similar works. 

2 Zunz, Gottesdienst. Vortrige der Juden, 1° Aufl. S. 62 f. 

ἐπ Io 


146 The Fall and Original Sin  |CHAP. 


talmud before ¢#e talmud,” and mishna before that of the 
third Christian century. But it is impossible wholly to 
distinguish what of ancient Jewish tradition has thus survived 
among the accretions of later times, or always to be certain 
that its original meaning has been preserved'!. Very much 
that will be quoted here from these writings is doubtless but 
individual opinion and not ancient tradition at all. Probably 
much of the older theological opinion, too, was lost in the 
process of compilation’. It is not always possible to be sure 
of the chronology of sayings which are expressly attributed 
in the Talmud and Midrashim to individual Rabbis; and very 
many sayings are quoted anonymously. Until we have 
advanced many steps in the higher criticism of the rabbinic 
literature? we may be wholly wrong, as Professor Stanton 
insists‘, in attributing views occurring in the Talmud to remote 
antiquity. Meanwhile, more caution must certainly be exer- 
cised than has been used, in the case of many writers, in 
relying on post-talmudic Jewish writings as exponents of 
ancient teaching, or on citations from rabbinic literature found 
in works of scholars, Jewish or Christian, of the modern 
period. Alleged citations have sometimes been found to be 
spurious, and unverified references have occasionally per- 
petuated error’. 

And if it is thus impossible to rely, without critical in- 
quiry, upon the antiquity of any given saying, view or 

1 Much of the same mythological material in which the pseudepigraphic 
writings often abound occurs in rabbinical literature, and no doubt a large 
proportion of this is ancient tradition. There is some truth, perhaps, in the 
remark : ‘‘ The rabbinical stories are anything but arbitrary inventions; they are 
echoes of primeval memories only refused entrance into the Bible by the compilers 
of the Canon” (Braun, Waturgeschichte der Sage, 1. 127); but it is only part of 
the truth, especially if ‘ primeval’ be taken literally. 

2 See Schechter, 7. Ὁ. 2. ν1., on Rabbinical Theology, and also Iv. pp. 456-7. 

3 On the lines, ¢.g., of Bacher’s valuable works, Dre Agada der Tannatten, and 
Die Agada der Palastin. Amorder. 

4 The Jewish and the Christian Messiah, p. 30. 

5 We have been warned, for instance, against Raymund Martin and Schoettgen 
by Jennings and Lowe. Schiller-Szinessy accuses Martin of forgery. See Journal 

y 

of Philology, vol. XVI. No. 31, p. 130 ff. 

Post-talmudic Jewish writers, and doubtless many of the talmudic period, were 


influenced by contact with Christianity. From the revival of rabbinism onwards 
there was controversy between the Synagogue and the Church. 


VII] 22,2 Rabbinical Literature 147 


doctrine, to be met with in rabbinic literature, it is still less 
possible, from the very nature of that literature, to derive from 
it any consistent or coherent body of theological doctrine. 
The writings in question consist, as has already been said, 
of tradition and individual opinion dating from different 
centuries. The doctrine which they contain is wholly wanting 
in system, classification and dogmatic definition. Great 
liberty of thought obtained amongst the Rabbis whose teach- 
ing is recorded ; and consequently we meet with discordant 
views on particular points, as well as with an abundance of 
antitheses, due to the emphasis now of this, and now of that, 
side of a question, at whose reconciliation no attempt is made 
because the need of such a thing was scarcely felt. It is no 
wonder then that, as M. Montefiore has said}, rabbinic 
literature “needs for its intelligent employment one who has 
been steeped in it from his youth.” And if an unintelligent 
employment of this literature is to be entirely avoided here, 
it can only be by making use of the previous labours of 
acknowledged experts in the field, and that with caution. 
For a summary of the statements of Rabbis on the subject of 
Adam’s first estate, the Fall and its consequences, Weber's 
Jiidische Theologte has been used to a considerable extent, 
though by no means exclusively. This work, which has for 
a considerable number of years been relied upon by many 
scholars, as the chief source of trustworthy information with 
regard to rabbinical theology, though almost indispensable 
and certainly of great value to students who have themselves 
given no special study to that branch of learning, does not, 
however, always use its sources quite satisfactorily. Its state- 
ments with regard to the rabbinical doctrine of the yezers, for 
example, some of which have been incorporated without 
verification into numerous theological treatises, are in several 
respects misleading. It is unfortunate, also, that this learned 
work cites its illustrative passages indiscriminately from 
sources of very different date; that it seldom supplies the 
name of the particular Rabbi to whom the saying in question 
is assigned ; and that it affords, as a rule, no information as 


1 Hibbert Lectures, p. 467. 


ere, 


148 The Fall and Original 51: |CHAP. 


to which of several varying opinions, if any, was the more 
generally accepted. Such shortcomings will probably have 
thrust themselves upon the notice of most students who have 
had recourse to this mine of rabbinical learning; and those 
who have verified its references will perhaps have sometimes 
found that it occasionally expresses the general sense of 
a passage in words which partially nisrepresent it’. 

It is the haggadic elements of the rabbinical literature 
which have to be searched for teaching as to the Fall and its 
consequences. Haggada is defined by Bacher as the “exe- 
getical elaboration of the contents of a verse, the evolution of 
new ideas based upon the interpretation of the biblical text.” 
It may perhaps be described as ‘manipulation’ of Scripture. 
Ideas are often reached by the imagination, or by the com- 
parison and blending of the teaching of one passage with that 
of others; and the result 15: then ‘deduced’ from some par- 
ticular verse. The fancifulness of some of the rabbinical 
statements is thus to be explained by the curious methods by 
which they were arrived at. 

It will not be necessary to reproduce here so exhaustive 
a collection of passages from the rabbinic writings, in illustra- 
tion of their theological treatment of the Fall, as has been 
attempted in the case of the Alexandrian and pseudepigraphic 
literature. Such a collection is already accessible to the 
student in the works of the various authorities whose labours 
have here been utilised. It will be sufficient to summarise 
such teaching as is relevant to our purpose, and to select, 
from the various sources available, the passages which best 
lend themselves to its illustration. 

Following the Old Testament, Jewish theology taught 
that man was made in the image of God. The simple 


1 Τί may be mentioned that the chief authorities which have here been relied 
upon, in addition to Weber, are Edersheim, Taylor, Hamburger, Schechter, 
Ginzberg, Montefiore, Bacher, Hershon and Porter. Wiinsche’s German trans- 
lation of the Talmud and of part of the Midrashim has been used. The author 
also gratefully acknowledges personal help from Dr Schechter. The future student 
will be furnished with most valuable aid in the English translation of the 
Babylonian Talmud by Dr Rodkinson, of which some thirteen volumes are already 
published, though the present writer has not had access to them; and in the 
Jewish Encyclopaedia, three volumes only of which have at present appeared. 


Vit] an Rabbinical Literature 149 


scriptural statement is, however, developed in various ways. 
The Targums of Onkelos and Pseudo-Jonathan* witness to 
the maintenance of the biblical doctrine, as also does the 
haggada of the Amoraim, and of Akiba?; but already in the 
Jerusalem Targum (Jerus. II.) it is taught: “ And the Word of 
the Lord created man in His likeness, in the likeness of the 
presence of the Lord He created him*.” Similarly the Tar- 
gum of Pseudo-Jonathan (Jerus. I.) interprets the words “Let 
us make man in our image” as referring to God and the 
angels who ministered to Him’. Thus the original Hebrew 
doctrine tended to be weakened into that of creation after the 
image of the angels. Again, we meet in the midrash, as 
in the writings of Philo, with the distinction between a 
celestial Adam, made in the image of God, and the earthly 
Adam‘>. 

It is unnecessary to endeavour to ascertain precisely how 
much was intended to be meant by the expression ‘image 
of God’ in rabbinic literature, inasmuch as the Fall is not 
stated to have caused the image to be lost. We pass on, 
therefore, to observe next, that the tendency to magnify 
Adam into a super-human being, which some authorities 
consider to be due to the influence of Chaldaean and Iranian 
mythology, and which is also observable in Philo and the 
pseudepigraphic writings, is well marked in the midrash and 
Talmud. Passages expressing the belief that the first man 
was endowed with extraordinary stature (he is frequently 
said to have filled the world), with physical beauty, with 
surpassing wisdom, with a brilliancy which eclipsed that of 
the sun, with a heavenly light which enabled him to see the 

1 See Etheridge, 7he Targums of the Pentateuch, pp. 37, 160. 

2 See Bacher, Die Agada der Pal. Amorder, Bd. τι. S. 485, and Die Agada 
der Tannaiter, Bd. 1. 5. 286. 

3 On Gen. i. 27. 

4 Cf. Pirke Aboth, 111. 14, where Akiba speaks of man as created ‘after an 
image.’ 

5 ‘See Taylor, Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, 2nd ed. p. 56; Ginzberg on 
Adam Kadmon in Jewish Encyclopaedia. 

This distinction was retained in later literature: e.g. Zohar, U1. 48b; and 
(Hamburger) μέγα Rabba, 144a. The midrash adopted also the idea that the 


first man was androgynous, an interpretation of Gen. possibly suggested to Philo 
by Plato. 


x 


150 The Fall and Original Sin  |CHAP. 


whole world, with immortality, and with a ministration of 
angels, have been collected by Weber’. To the statements 
there made it may be added that Adam was sometimes said 
to be the father of all arts and inventions’. Many of these 
fancies are common to pseudepigraphic and gnostic literature, 
and are probably pre-Christian in antiquity and largely 
foreign in origin. The Jewish-heathen idea of Adam’s super- 
human wisdom passed over into the Christian Church, as well 
as into heretical sects; and having received the sanction of 
several fathers, such as S. Augustine, and of Aquinas and 
other schoolmen, it became the germ of very elaborate de- 
velopments at the hands of post-Reformation divines’*. 

Many of the physical excellences thus attributed to the 
first man were lost at his fall4, Of Adam’s moral endow- 
ments at the first, and of the effect of his transgression upon 
them, something will be said later. It may be further stated 
at this point, however, that cosmic effects are now and again 
attributed to the fall of man by the Rabbis. The earth and 
the heavenly bodies lost their brightness®; death came upon 


1 ofp. cit.,S. 214,15. Seealso Bacher, Agadad. Amorder, τ. Ὁ. 156, 11. S. 50, etc. 

2 Bereschith Rabba, cc. 17 and 24. This midrash, according to Zunz, dates 
from the 6th cent. and preserves old Palestinian traditions. 

In Zanchuma the saying given above is attributed to R. Eleazer b. Pedath. 
Similarly R. Simon is reported to have said that ‘‘So long as Adam was devoted 
to his Maker, wisdom and power, counsel and insight were his” (Bacher, 
Amorder, Bd. 11. S. 465). R. Jehuda b. Simon taught that Adam, in his original 
estate, was allowed to see all future generations, with their wise and learned ; 
(op. czt., 111. S. 173-4); and R. Jose asserted that God imparted knowledge to 
Adam by revelation, so that he was enabled to generate fire by rubbing two 
stones together (Pesachim, 54 a). 

5. Τὴ Clem. Homilies, τι. 18, we read: ‘‘Our father (Adam) was ignorant of 
nothing.”’ 

For Aquinas’ teaching, see Szmma, pars I. 94. Bishop South’s famous 
sermon is the best known instance of the fancifully exaggerated post-Reformation 
teaching, but Bishop Bull goes nearly as far (Works, 11. p. 340). 

4 See Weber, of. cit., S. 222. 

It should be noted, however, that among these the removal of the Shekinah 
from earth was only by one stage—it was removed further by six successive human 
sins—and that not permanently, according to Beresch. Rabba, c. 19 (on Gen. iii. 8): 
and in the same place it is said that the reduction of Adam’s height to roo 
ells (R. Ibo) was the act of Adam himself when he hid from God after 
his sin, 

5 Beresch. Rabba,c. 12. Cf. Zohar, ΠῚ 83 b. 


vil] 21 Rabbinical Literature [51 


all creatures, as well as upon the human race?; the brutes no 
longer showed awe for man nor were obedient to him?; the 
course of the planets was changed®; “845 soon as the first man 
sinned everything became perverted and will no more return 
to order until the Messiah comes?.” In these details rabbinical 
speculation is practically identical with that of the apocalyptic 
writers. 

The paradisaic life of the first parents, with its freedom 
from pain and its outward splendour, is represented by the 
Rabbis, as in some of the pseudepigraphic books’*, to have 
been of extremely short duration—only a few hours. If this 
opinion prevailed—and ancient speculation seems to have 
tended to make the period before the Fall very short’—the 
rabbinic statements referred to by Weber’, to the effect that 
the unfallen state was one of peace and untroubled joy, 
during which man was unhurt by evil spirits, cannot count 
for much. But we encounter here individual fancies rather 
than a body of traditional and harmonious doctrine. 

Adam’s repentance, of which we hear much in at least the 
post-Christian portion of pseudepigraphic literature, seems 
also to have been emphasised by several Rabbis of the second 
century ® 

The temptation in Eden is treated by the Rabbis very 


1 Beresch. Rabba,c.19. The reason here assigned is that Eve gave the animals 
the forbidden fruit. The phoenix alone did not eat of it. 


ἘΠ ΟΣ C. 25. 

δ δα ον το: Ἀγ), CO. T2014. 
5 ¢.g. ‘A’ recension of Zhe Secrets of Enoch, XXXII. 1. 
6 


Aboth di R. Nathan, c.1; cf. Sanxhedr. 38b; Beresch. Rabba, c. 94. Weber 
gives references to Beresch. Rabba, c. 18, 22, and the much later work Yadlkut 
Schim., Beresch. 23. The same view appears in several of the Adam Books. In 
the Book of /Jubilees the life in Paradise is said to have lasted 7 years: so also 
Syncellus taught. Josephus puts its duration as at least several days; cf. John 
Damasc. De orth. fide, 11. το, Augustine, De Civit, xx. 26, Gregory (Great), 
Dial. \v. τ; these authorities are followed by Pererius and Ussher. R. Ammi 
(Beresch. Radda, 11.), Irenaeus, Ephrem, Epiphanius, some scholastics, and perhaps 
Luther, fix upon one day as its limit. Apparently solitary in his wisdom among 
ancient writers, Eusebius (Chrvoz. 1. 16, 4, ed. Mai.) said no one could tell 
anything about it. 

oS 2203. 
8 Kohler, Art. 4dam in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, gives the following references : 
Erubin, 18b; Aboda Zara, 8a; Aboth di R. Nathan, 1. 


152 The Fall and Original Sin  [CHAP. 


much in the same way as that with which we shall become 
accustomed in studying the apocalyptic writings ; the details 
are in many cases common to both streams of Palestinian 
literature, and may therefore be supposed to be so far derived 
from common ancient sources—“ pre-talmudic haggada.” 

As in Josephus and the Look of /ubilees, the tempter is 
sometimes spoken of simply as the serpent, which is then 
represented as somewhat more than a speaking reptile, at 
least before the curse. Thus R. Hoschaia?! said that the 
serpent was double-horned, upright like a stick, and stood on 
feet. In other passages the serpent is regarded merely as 
the instrument of Satan or Samael, as will be seen from 
citations about to be given. The motive of envy is generally 
assigned as the reason for the tempter’s determination to ruin 
the first parents of the race. Whatever may have been the 
form of the legend on which the statement of the Book of 
Wisdom is based, that “by the envy of the devil death 
entered into the world,’ there were several versions of it 
current amongst the Rabbis of the early centuries A.D., as 
amongst the Jewish apocalyptic writers. According to one 
of these, the serpent envied Adam his privileges in Paradise. 
When he saw Adam reclining, whilst attending angels roasted 
flesh and strained wine for him, he was moved to envy?. 
This reads more like the fanciful invention of a Rabbi than 
a genuine old tradition. More ancient, in all probability, was 
the view taken in Pzrke di R. Elieser, c. 134 and elsewhere, 
because of its affinity with that of the Vzta Adae. But still 
more commonly do we meet with the view that the serpent 


1 «Urheber von grossen Traditionssammlungen...welche sich der Mischna 
Jehuda’s I an die Seite stellten,” Bacher, Pal. Amoréer, 1. 80. 

The passage alluded to above occurs in Beresch. Rabba, c. το; in c. 20 it is 
added that, after beguiling Eve, the serpent’s hands and feet were cut off by 
angels. 

2 Cf. the description of the tempter in 4Zoc. of Abraham (p. 194 of this work). 
This tradition appears again in Aphraates, /Yomilies, ed. Wright, p. 255 (a 
reference due to Ginzberg, M/onatsschrift f. Geschichte u. Wissenschaft Judenthums, 
43) 5. 153). 

3 Sanhedr. 59b, where the teaching is assigned to R. Jehuda Ὁ. Thema; in 
Aboth di R. Nathan, c. τ, it is referred to R. Jehuda Ὁ. Bathera. 

4 The view according to which the serpent envied Adam his lordship over 
creation, and his greatness in general. 


ΝΠ] in Rabbinical Literature 153 


envied Adam on account of his wife, whom he desired himself 
to possess. These two ideas are indeed combined in a saying 
attributed in one place! to R. Jose b. Chalastha (second cen- 
tury), but elsewhere cited anonymously, according to which 
the serpent’s plan was to kill Adam and marry Eve, and to 
be king over all the earth. But in the majority of rabbinical 
sayings on the motive of the tempter, desire for Eve alone is 
ascribed to him, and envy of Adam’s greatness becomes 
secondary or vanishes. Thus, in Sofa, 9b, the tempter is 
made to say: “I will kill Adam and take Eve to wife,” and 
in Bereschith Rabba, c. 18, it is related that the serpent was 
filled with desire for Eve on witnessing the life of the man 
and wife in Paradise. Inc. 20 of the same midrash a similar 
statement to that just cited from SoZza is ascribed to R. Asi 
and R. Hoschaia; and in the latter case the ascription is 
corroborated by Bacher, thus carrying the saying back to the 
earliest generation of Amoraim. 

It was shown in an earlier chapter that there is some 
reason to suspect that the original legends which were woven 
into the Fall-story of Genesis were connected with the origin 
of the sexual relation. Such a suggestion has been forced, in 


different ways, upon writers of different ages. It may be of | 


interest to note that the narrative of the first sin was some- | 
times interpreted in rabbinic literature as symbolical in this | 


sense, as it also was occasionally in Jewish pseudepigraphic 
writings, The proof that such interpretations contain an 
echo of ancient Hebrew tradition—a thing perfectly possible 
in itself—is not forthcoming; for we possess no connecting 
links, no evidence of continuity of development from the 
hypothetical Hebrew legend to the Jewish haggada, necessary 
to the establishment of such a conclusion. Moreover we have 
to allow for the fertility of the rabbinical imagination, and 
also for the fact that the interpretation in question is far from 


1 Aboth di R. Nathan, c. 1 (34). 

2 Apocal. of Abraham (see p. 194) and Slavonic Book of Baruch (ed. Bonwetsch, 
S. 97). ‘The first thing by which Adam came to fall is the vine; the second 
sinful lust, which Satanail poured out upon Adam and Eve.” This passage, 
however, may refer to the belief in the intercourse of Adam and Eve with demons ; 
see below. 


154 The Fall and Original Stn — |CHAP. 


universal. The following instances of it, however, may be 
mentioned. 

Edersheim! told us that the account of the Fall in 
Bereschith Rabba seemed to him to insinuate a symbolical 
view of its history, and to assign evil concupiscence as its 
cause. This tendency is certainly suggested by several 
passages of that midrash. In c. 20 is a saying attributed to 
ΚΝ. Acha, an Amora of the fourth century, which may possibly 
imply this line of thought. It is to the effect that in Eve’s 
name? lies the proof that she was ‘the serpent’ of Adam, 
and tempted him as she herself was tempted by the serpent. 
A little further on (c. 22), the same saying takes the following 
form: “The serpent was thy serpent, and thou wast Adam’s 
serpent.” Now it will presently be shown that the belief that 
Eve was tempted by the serpent to unchastity with him was 
widely prevalent in rabbinic’ and other circles, and probably 
goes back to pre-Christian times. If then the words quoted 
above be taken to imply that Eve not only tempted Adam, 
but tempted him in the same way as that in which she herself 
had been beguiled by the serpent, the Fall would seem to be 
represented here as consisting in the fleshly union of Adam 
and Eve. The inference is possible, however, rather than 
necessary. A very explicit instance of the particular form of 
the belief in question which sees in the forbidden fruit the 
union of Adam and Eve with each other, is furnished by 
a passage cited by Ginzberg’ from Pzirke di R. Elieser, c. 21, 
in which the command to Adam and Eve to abstain from the 
tree in the middle of the garden is expounded piecemeal, in 
the light of other texts of scripture, as a prohibition from the 
marriage relation. This work is, of course, of late date for 
our purpose, being generally assigned to the seventh or eighth 
century at the earliest, and is said to betray contact with 
Mohammedanism. Thus, though some of its haggada is 
proved, by its kinship with that of such writings as the Book 
of Jubilees and the Enoch literature, to be pre-Christian, the 
passage to which reference has been made cannot be assumed 

Life and Times etc., vol. 1. p. 165, note 3. 


1 
2 See above, p. 26. 
iy Ris An FES 5 222: 


| 


VII] mm Rabbinical Literature 155 


to be necessarily of high antiquity: the more so because it 
appears to be unique. 

Indeed the view that the Fall consisted in the union of 
Adam and Eve is on the whole foreign to the rabbinical way 
of thinking. There was a widely current haggada to the 
effect that Adam and Eve enjoyed a period of married life 
in Eden, and that it was this that made the serpent envious!. 
R. Jochanan b. Chanina is said to have taught that Cain and 
his sister were born to Adam éefore the Fall, and indeed this 
view is ascribed to several Rabbis?» Moreover the sin of 
partaking of the forbidden fruit, ze. the fall described in 
Genesis, is not unfrequently associated in the midrash with 
abuse of the vine. 

A passage to this effect is adduced by Weber’ from 
Bammidbar Rabba, c. 10, a work assigned by Schiirer to the 
twelfth century, in which it is represented that Eve, when 
conversing with the serpent, drank wine, and awakened 
passion in Adam by offering it to him. It is then added: 
“this is Adam the old, who is the head of all men, for through 
wine has death been inflicted upon him”; and further, “ this 
is Adam the first; for through the wine which he drank has 
the world been cursed for his sake, for R. Abin says: Eve 
mixed wine for Adam and he drank.” ‘This may not be an 
ancient tradition, as R. Abin lived in the fourth century. 
The same doctrine however is taught elsewhere. Thus in 
Sanhedr. 70a, we find the saying, ascribed by some to 
eeviara kbassby otnersstoe ws oaccal*s Lhe Holy One, 
blessed be He! said to Noah, ‘Thou shouldst have taken 


1 At the end of c. 18 of Beresch. Rabba, R. Joshua b. Karcha (Tannaite) is 
said to have stated, as a reason for including the words ‘‘ And the serpent was 
subtil...” within the last verse of Gen. ii., that they serve to show ¢he sinful motive 
for the serpent’s attack upon Adam and Eve. The words italicised are what we 
take to be implied by Wiinsche’s rendering wegen welcher Siinde. The German 
translation continues: es sak ste namlich mit dem Beischlafe beschaftigt und im 
Folgen dessen bekam es Lust zu thr. Cf. also c. 19 (on Gen. iii. 2). The same 
teaching is ascribed to R. Eleazar b. Azariah, of the mishnic period. 

2 Sanhedr. 38b. The Book of Jubilees maintained the opposite doctrine, which 
was embraced also by Christian writers. See Ginzberg, of. ci. 

3 op. cit., 5. 220. 

4 See Bacher, Pal. Amorder, Bd. 11. S. 643. 


156 The Fall and Original Sin  [CHAP. 


warning from Adam and not indulged in the use of wine 
as he did'’?” That the forbidden tree was the vine was a 
common opinion, both in rabbinical and pseudepigraphic 
haggada* To cite from the former class of literature, 
R. Meir (of the second century) is stated to have held this 
belief, and to have said: “for wine alone brings misfortune 
into the world*.” The same opinion 15 attributed, in Beresch. 
Rabba, c. 19, to R. Ibo. 

It cannot, therefore, be maintained that the view according 
to which the Fall consisted in the natural union of Adam 
and Eve was other than very exceptional, and probably late, 
in rabbinic literature, whatever may have been the origin of 
the material of the Hebrew narrative itself. It is beyond 
question, however, that various legends concerning the 
monstrous intercourse of Adam and Eve with demons, and 
especially of Eve with the serpent or Satan, were both wide- 
spread and ancient among the Jews; and this is rather the 
sense in which, as Edersheim observed, the Fall is associated 
in rabbinic writings with evil concupiscence. 

The curious belief just mentioned is of some importance 
because it supplied Judaism with a doctrine in some respects 
similar to that of original sin and hereditary corruption, 
coarse and materialistic as is the conception of human 
pollution which it contains*. Several pseudepigraphic writings, 


1 Cf. the passage cited above, from Slav. Baruch, p. 153, note 2, where the 
Fall is associated with both the sins of drunkenness and lust. 

* See Apocal. of Abraham, 22; Book of Enoch, XXXu1. 43 Greek Apocalypse of 
Baruch (3 Apoc. Bar. of Dr James); Slav. Baruch (Bonwetsch, in Nachr. d. 
konigl. Gesellschaft zu Gottingen, 1876, S. 97); Apocalypse of Job (Texts and 
Studies, vol. v. p. Ixii). Ginzberg refers also to Origen, 72 Gen. X. 20, and 
Epiphanius, //ae7. XVI., in illustration of the fact that the belief obtained amongst 
the Gnostics. 

3 Beracoth, 40 ἃ. 

The nature of the forbidden tree was a matter of discussion among the Rabbis, 
and different views were maintained. In addition to those already mentioned, 
some held it was the fig, others the olive (see Weber, 8. 220). R. Joshua 
Ὁ. Levi (3rd cent.) declared that the nature of the tree had never been revealed 
and never would be (Bacher, Pal. Amorder, 1. 169). R. Chanin, one of the 
later Amoraim, held that the knowledge of good and evil came to Adam, not by 
the tree, but through the removal of his rib (Bacher, of. c7t., 111. 92). 

4 An eminent German scholar, with singularly perverted ingenuity, has 
endeavoured to trace the Pauline anthropology to this root. 


vil] an Rabbinical Literature 157 


as will be seen, emphasise the fact that it was Eve only whom 
the devil tempted, and that the temptation took the form 
of seduction to unchastity with him. The same notions are 
insisted upon in rabbinic writings. Meanwhile, an indication 
of the existence of a story intermediate between those 
mentioned and those about to be given, deserves notice. In 
c. 1 of the Aboth di R. Nathan, a work whose midrash, 
allowing for later tampering, probably represents that of a 
time prior to the general reception of R. Jehuda’s mishna’, 
‘the evil serpent’ is described as saying “if I cannot undo 
Adam, I will attempt it with Eve.” He therefore approaches 
her and draws her into conversation, during which he shakes 
the forbidden tree, so that its fruit falls to the ground. It 
is extremely probable that we have here, in uncompleted form, 
the same legend as occurs (see p. 197) in the Apocalypse of 
Moses, according to which the tempter, before giving Eve of 
the tree to eat, infused lust into the fruit, whereby passion 
was aroused in her. This, however, is not the usual form of 
the story of Eve’s pollution. In several tractates of the 
Talmud a contamination of the race is spoken of, which is 
ascribed to the serpent’s intercourse with Eve, and to the 
poison which she derived from him®. This stain was removed 
from Israel by the great redemptive act in the nation’s 
history, the giving of the law at Mt Sinai; but it still remains 
in the Gentiles. We thus have a Jewish doctrine of inherited 
corruption, which, derived from Satan, was transmitted by 
Eve to all her seed. And the doctrine was persistent. 
Malan supplies a reference to a similar belief in Maimonides, 


1 See Winter u. Wiinsche, Die /Jrid. Litteratur, Bd. 1. S. 619 ff., where a 
translation of the passage relating the account of the Fall is to be found. 

2 Sabbath, 146a. ‘*‘ Why are the Cuthites contaminated? Because they did 
not stand at Mt Sinai; for when the serpent had intercourse with Eve, it injected 
poison into her. The Israelites, who stood at Mt Sinai, have lost this poison ; 
the Gentiles, on the contrary, who did not stand on Mt Sinai, have not lost this 
poison.” This is attributed to R. Jose. R. Abba b. Kahana, another Amora, 
taught that the poison was not lost during the first three patriarchal generations, 
because Abraham begat Ishmael, and Isaac begat Esau; but that in the twelve 
sons of Jacob, because they were without blemish, it disappeared. The same 
doctrine as is here ascribed to R. Jose is attributed to R. Jochanan in /ebamoth, 
103 b; and it occurs again in Adoda Zara, 22 Ὁ. 


158 The Fall and Original 51: |CHAP. 


which, he adds, is told somewhat differently in Yalkut Schum. 
(fol. 8, 25) by R. Elieser. It occurs again in Meve Schalom, 
x. c. 9: “By observing the commandments a man is cleansed 
from his impurity ; and he is purged from the pollution of 
the old serpent.” As to its antiquity, the evidence of other 
Jewish writings than those of the talmudic period abundantly 
proves that, in the germ at least, the story was current in the 
first century A.D. It may be questioned, however, whether 
it was of purely Jewish origin. The rabbinic writings, as we 
have seen, frequently speak of the serpent as the instrument 
used by Samael or Satan. A further instance may be given 
from Pirke di R. Eleser, c. 13, where it is stated that “among 
all the creatures Samael found none so fitted to do evil as 
the serpent. The serpent glided like a camel, and Samael 
mounted it; and so it was, that everything which the serpent 
did and said was only at the instigation of Samael.” This 
passage has been cited because it presents the familiar story 
of the devil’s use of the serpent in language which is more 
than usually suggestive of a foreign source. The colouring, 
in this case, may possibly be Mohammedan’. There can be 
little doubt, however, that the story of the zzquznamentum, to 
which the foregoing legend is the necessary preliminary, is 
ultimately of Iranian derivation. Kohler has pointed out 
the close resemblance of the Jewish story of the descent of 
Samael and his selection of the serpent as his instrument for 
the seduction of Eve and for polluting her with a poison of 
impurity, to a legend contained in the Bundahesci)’, according 
to which Ahriman appears in the guise of a serpent and casts 
poison into man with the aid of Jeh, the personification of 
menstrual impurity* 

The legendary event on which the crude and coarse Jewish 
doctrine of inherited corruption is based, the union, that is, of 
Eve and the serpent, is often alluded to in rabbinical and 
other Jewish writings independently of the consequence some- 


1 Ginzberg, of. czt., 43, S. 152; Griinbaum, Sem7t. Sagenkunde, S. 61. 
2 §. 8. &. vi. 6. See also Windischmann, Zoroast. Studien, S. 61. 
3 It should be noted that in Adoth αἱ R. Nathan, part of Eve’s punishment 


consists in pains etc. connected with the class of things personified by the Iranian 
Sete 


ΝΠ] wn Rabbinical Literature 159 


times attributed to it. The Rabbis appear to have taught 
that Cain was begotten of Eve by Satan. The two passages 
which Weber cites (S. 219) in proof of this are indeed from 
works that cannot claim to be regarded as ancient. Pzrke di 
R. Eleser, however, contains ancient tradition, as is proved by 
the similarity of its contents with the legendary matter found 
in early pseudepigrapha. Yalkut Schim. is of much later 
date—Zunz assigns it to the beginning of the thirteenth 
century’; but this too embodies very ancient haggada, and 
the passage with which we are here concerned may therefore 
possibly reflect very early tradition. Moreover there is direct 
proof that this curious notion as to the parentage of Cain was 
not an invention of late Rabbis. It was known to several of 
the early fathers as a belief possessed by Gnostic Sects?; and 
it was therefore, in all probability, of high antiquity; for 
otherwise it would be difficult to. account for the fact of its 
being so widely spread. 

Another class of sayings involving, perhaps, a reference to 
the view which identified the first sin of Eve with a sin of 
unchastity, are those which assert the prolonged intercourse 
of both Adam and Eve with demons. Weber quotes, in 
illustration of such a belief, from the late medieval work 
Yalkut Schim. The same passage occurs, however, in the 
talmudic tractate Hrudzn, and is there attributed to Κα. Jirmeja 
b. Eleazar’, who lived, according to Bacher*, most probably in 
the latter half of the third century. This haggadist said: 
“ All those years which Adam spent in alienation from God, 
he begat evil spirits, demons and fairies.” A similar saying is 


1 Weber, of. cét., Ὁ. xxx. 

2 See, e.g., the following passage from Epiphanius, Haer. XL. 5: ἕτερον dé 
πάλιν μῦθον λέγουσιν οἱ τοιοῦτοι, ὅτι φησίν, ὁ διάβολος ἐλθὼν πρὸς τὴν Εὔαν 
συνήφθη αὐτῇ ὡς ἀνὴρ γυναικὶ καὶ ἐγέννησεν ἐξ αὐτῆς τόν τε Katy καὶ τὸν Αβελ. 

When Ginzberg, of. czz., S. 225, attributes the same view to Tertullian on the . 
strength of the passage (De Fatientia, c. 5): Mam statim illa semine diabolt 
concepta malitiae foecunditate tram filium procreavit, surely he is in error. The 
context does not at all suggest that z//a refers to Eve; indeed it can only refer to 
impatientia, in the preceding sentence. And if it were taken to refer to Eve, 
what would become of Tertullian’s latinity? 

ὁ Hershon, Rabbinical Commentary on Genesis, and Bacher, Die Agada der 
Pal. Amoraer, Bd. 11. S. 450. 

4 of. cit., Bd. 111. S. 0592. 


160 The Fall and Original Sin [CHAP. 


attributed, in Bereschith Rabba, to R. Simon of the same 
period’. It is shown in another chapter that legends con- 
necting the Fall with the sin of impurity were known to pseud- 
epigraphical writers of the first century A.D.?; consequently 
it will not be rash to agree with Gfrorer, that “the belief that 
Samael and his host tempted our first parents to unchastity 
and practised it with them is very old, and reaches right back 
into the times of Christ*”; nor to see, with Thackeray, who 
cites these words with approval, traces of the same belief in 
the writings of 5. Paul’. 

It would naturally be expected, from all the fancifulness 
and triviality in their treatment of the details of the Fall- 
story, that the Rabbis entertained but a light estimate of the 
first sin itself, and of its consequences for the race. According 
to Weber’s judgment, who, however, is perhaps not wholly 
free from an unconscious tendency to contrast Judaism un- 
favourably with Christianity, this was generally the case®. 
And certainly the Fall is asserted by some teachers to have 
been merely the transgression of a slight command. One of 
the earlier Amoraim, in fact, went so far as to say it was an 
event for which we ought to be grateful, since, had it not 
occurred, we should not be in existence® 

Nevertheless, there is a vein of seriousness in the rabbinical 
teaching concerning the fall of man. How far it is exceptional 
need not here be investigated. Nor will it be necessary to 
reproduce the passages which have already been collected by 

Ufa στὴ ΒΟ Nand SOc 

2 See pp. 194, 197, 209, and cf. the Gnostic doctrine described by Irenaeus, 
Adv. Haer. \. 30. 7- 

3 Jahrhundert des Heils, Ba. 1. S. 398. 

4 The relation of S. Paul to contemp. Jew. thought, p. 52 ff. Cf. below, p. 208, 
See 2 Cor. xi. 2—3, 1 Tim. ii, 13—15; and cf. 4 Mace. xviii. 7—8. 

J Of tt larvae. Ts 

6 The saying is attributed to R. Simon Ὁ. Lakisch (3rd cent.); see Bacher, 


Pal. Amorder, Bd. 1. S. 354. It is based on Ps. Ixxxii. 6, 7, and therefore does 
not serve to illustrate the interpretation of the Fall-story discussed in the preceding 
pages. 

Beresch. Rabba (on Gen. iv. 13) understands Cain’s speech to imply that his 
father’s transgression, involving the punishment of expulsion from Paradise, was 
slight indeed in comparison with his own. Finally, Schechter mentions that 
R. David of Roccamartica wrote a work proving the sinlessness of Adam, for 
which he was not rebuked. 


vil] im Rabbinical Literature 161 


Weber to show that Adam’s disobedience was at least oc- 
casionally regarded as a momentous act of deliberate revolt 
against God. A striking saying, cited by Dr Schechter}, 
may, however, be added to Weber’s list, which maintains that 
Adam would not have committed his sin “unless he had first 
denied the ‘ Root of all’ (or the main principle), viz. the belief 
in the omnipresence of God.” 

It was of course universally taught by the Rabbis that our 
first parents’ disobedience brought death upon themselves. 
The Targum of Pseudo-Jonathan on Gen. iii. 6 says that Eve, 
when beside the tree, “saw Samael, the angel of death, and 
was afraid,’ and repeats the denunciation of death against 
Adam and Eve much in the words of the Scripture. And 
such teaching is representative. The difficulty arising out of 
the fact that Adam did not die in the day on which he ate 
the forbidden fruit is sometimes’ explained by the Rabbis, 
as it is in the Book of Fubilees, by taking the day to be a 
thousand years. 

It is more important, however, to ascertain what opinions 
were held by the Rabbis upon the relation of the mortality of 
the race to the punishment of Adam and Eve with death. 
For here we enter again upon the subject of the consequences 
of the Fall, and approach the doctrine of original guilt. 
Previous writers, such as Edersheim and Weber, have pointed 
out the existence of two or three different views in rabbinical 
literature with regard to the cause of death amongst mankind; 
but no certain knowledge has yet been attained as to whether 
these divergent views succeeded one another in time, or whether 
they coexisted in different schools or in the minds of individual 
Rabbis. Ginzberg, in one of the series of papers to which 
reference has several times been made, has argued that the 
view, according to which every man brings death upon himself 
by his own sin, was the prevalent teaching in the earliest 
centuries of our era, but that this gave place to the doctrine 
that the universal mortality of the race is due to Adam’s fall. 
And this generalisation would seem to be for the most part 
true. But, in the light of the fact that, already in Ben Sira’s 


17. Q. R. 1. 54, and Studies in Judaism. 


162 The Fall and Original Sin — |CHAP. 


day, the first sin was assigned as the cause of death to the 
race, and that this view was quite general amongst the 
pseudepigraphists of the first century, whose haggada was 
very largely identical with that of the Rabbis of the mishnic 
and talmudic periods, the statement is perhaps too sweeping. 
It is very probable that the individualistic view was much 
more generally held in the first and second than in the third 
and following centuries, and was then rapidly replaced by 
that which had already obtained a footing in the Christian 
Church. But that the doctrine which attributes our mortality 
to Adam was not held by any of the Tannaim is perhaps 
more than can be proved, though traces of its existence 
amongst them seem to be extremely rare’. 

The Old Testament view that man is by nature mortal, 
and that death was predetermined for him by his Creator 
from the first,a view which some have believed still to survive 
in Ecclesiasticus, in spite of verse 24 of the twenty-fifth 
chapter of that book’, is not frequently met with in rabbinic 
literature®. Death is generally regarded as the consequence 
of sin, for us as well as for Adam. The question remains, 
how far is it regarded as in each case the consequence of the 
individual’s sin, and how far as the consequence of the fall of 
Adam? 

It has already been mentioned that the generations of 
Rabbis nearest the time of Christ seem to have been more 
inclined to emphasise the individual’s responsibility for his 
death, just as they emphasised his responsibility for his 
sinfulness. Following the individualistic doctrine of guilt, of 
which Ezekiel was a foremost preacher, R. Ammi rigidly main- 
tained that “there is no death without sin” Dr Schechter® 
considers that there can hardly be any doubt that this view 
was held by the authorities of much earlier times than that 


1 Beresch. Rabba, on Gen. iii. 7, attributes ultimately to Akiba a comparison 
or illustration in which occur the words: ‘‘ Even so did God show to the first of 
mankind how many generations they had ruined.”? This most probably refers to 
physical death. 

2 See p. 110. 

3 See Edersheim, Speaker's Commentary, in loc. 

4 Sabbath, 55 ἃ, where rival traditions are brought together. 

5 Studies in Judaism, pp. 260 ff. 


vil] 22 Rabbinical Literature 163 


of R. Ammi, viz. the third century A.D. He refers to the 
anxiety frequently betrayed by the Tannaim to explain away 
the cases in the Old Testament of the children suffering for 
the parents’ sin, and to assign great crimes as the causes of 
great sufferings. 

To illustrate the position maintained by R. Ammi, a 
legend is narrated in Zanchuma}, according to which “all the 
pious, being permitted to behold the Shekinah before their 
death, reproach Adam (as they pass him by at the gate) for 
having brought death upon them; to which he replies: ‘I 
died with but one sin, but you have committed many; on 
account of these you have died, not on my account2?’” 
Curiously enough, an exactly similar legend is elsewhere 
appealed to, as will presently be seen, in support of the 
opposite theory. But there is better evidence that the 
individualistic view was strongly supported in pre-talmudic 
times. The direct consequence of such a doctrine would be 
the sinfulness of the saints and patriarchs ; yet even this was 
definitely maintained by R. Elieser b. Hirkanos: “If the 
Holy One, blessed be He! should enter into judgment with 
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they would not be able to stand 
before the proving (or exposure)*.” This, if we are justified 
in extracting so much from a sentence of Justin Martyr’s, 
would seem to have been the prevailing Jewish teaching so 
late as the second century. For that apologist says to 
Trypho!: “And not even will you (Jews) venture to assert 
that anyone performed all those commandments (Deut. xxvii. 
26) exactly ; but some kept them more, and some less, than 
others.” Another second century Rabbi, Chanina b. Dosa, 
has been credited with a saying which, though not all 
referring to the Fall-story, serves to illustrate the belief in 
the doctrine that individualism is in every case the cause of 
death: “It is not the serpent which kills, but the sin in us®.” 

1 This is cited by Kohler in Jewzsh Encyclopaedia, Art. Adam. 

2 Cf. Test. of Abraham: see p. 195. 

3 Arachin, 17 4. 
4 Dial. 5. Tryph. c. 95. 
> The words refer to death from serpent-bites; see Beracoth, 33a, and also 


Schemoth Rabba, c. 3 {on Ex. iv. 3), where it is reproduced in connexion with 
Moses’ fear of the serpent into which his rod was converted. 


1 ar 


164 The Fall and Original 5172 |CHAP. 


Again, to return to the discussion in the tractate Sabbath, it 
was objected to R. Ammi’s teaching, “no death without sin,” 
that when the angels of service asked God if Moses and 
Aaron had not kept the whole law, and yet had died like 
Adam, God answered in the words of Eccles. ix. 2, “All 
things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous 
and to the wicked.” But the authority of R. Simeon b. 
Eleazar is then claimed by Ammi: “ Moses and Aaron also 
died on account of their own sins, as is said in Num. xx. 12, 
‘therefore, because ye have not believed.’” It is added, 
“R. Simeon b. Eleazar has, however, said: ‘there is also a 
death without sin, and suffering without guilt.” 

Here we have an instance of the conflict of the two alter- 
native views. The need for making exceptions to R. Ammi’s 
teaching is further evidenced by the saying that four men, 
Benjamin, Amram, Jesse and Chiliab, were free from actual 
sin, and died because of the transgression brought about by 
the serpent’s counsel’. On the principle of the exception 
proving the rule, this saying is a witness to the authority of 
the view which made each man “the Adam of his own soul.” 

The rival view, that all men owe their mortality to their 
first father, is found, at least from the time of the Amoraim, 
existing side by side with this teaching. Schechter remarks 
that there was never any decision between them*® But it 
would seem that, as Judaism grew older, the individualistic 
view dwindled in strength and it became more and more 
generally believed, perhaps through the emphasis on original 
sin within the Church, that Adam was responsible for the 
death of his descendants. The change would perhaps also 
be partly due to growing reverence for the patriarchs and 
other great Old Testament figures, rendering R. Elieser’s 
earlier insistence on their sinfulness in the sight of God, and 
the doctrine of absolute individual responsibility upon which 
it depended, less tenable. But, however this may be, the 
doctrine that death was due to the original transgression 


1 Baba Bathra, 17a. It is also stated here as a tradition of the Rabbis, that 


‘*over six had the angel of death no power, viz. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, 
Aaron and Miriam.” 


5 


* op. ¢tt., p. 180. 


vit] 22,1 Rabbinical Literature 165 


of Adam was common in the talmudic period. R. Jose 
(4th cent.) is stated in Szphra, 27 ἃ, to have said with regard 
to Adam, “for whose single transgression he and all his 
posterity were punished with death’ Moses, who was 
declared by R. Simeon to have brought death upon himself 
by his unbelief, was held by Κα. Levi?, to have died “ because 
of the sin of the first man, who brought death into the world.” 
In Lrubin, τὸ Ὁ, Adam is said to have isolated himself from 
Eve because he saw that his sin was the cause of universal 
death: a saying which reappears with a modification at the 
end of c. 21 of Beresch. Rabba, where Adam is said to have 
abstained from begetting children because he saw his posterity 
would be condemned to Gehenna, until he perceived that, 
after six and twenty generations, the Israelites would accept 
the Law. Delitzsch? quotes a. passage from Pestkta di 
R. Cahana, 118 a, according to which Adam's posterity 
appeared to him when he ate of the forbidden tree, and he 
acknowledged to them that he had been the cause of death. 
It would seem that legends once used to support what was 
probably the older doctrine with regard to death were actually 
altered to suit the increasingly prevalent idea of original sin. 

Though rabbinic teaching may, at. the time when Chris- 
tianity appeared, have sometimes supported the view that 
death was a consequence of Adam’s sin, and though apoca- 
lyptic writers certainly did so, it does not appear that the 


1 In VYalkut Schim. this saying is expanded; referring to Szphre, 27 a, and to 
Valkut, 1. 479, a writer in Journal of PaAtlology, XV1. pp. 139-40, quotes thus: 
«Ἐς Jose says: if thou wishest to know the reward of the pious in the world to 
come, go and learn it from the first Adam, who had only been commanded one 
single law, which he transgressed ; see how many deaths were decreed against him 
and his generations, and against the generations of his generations, to the end of 
his generations.” 

2 Debarim Rabba, 9. (Wiinsche, 5. 101.) Cf. Bacher, Pal. Amordaer, Bd. 11. 
S. 420. See also Kohel. Rabba, on V. 13. 

3 Paulus d. Apostel’s Brief an die Romer, u.s.w., 5. 82. Pesikta is a post- 
talmudic work, and perhaps a century later than Beresch. Radda. 

Tholuck, in his work on the Epistle to the Romans, cites the following passages : 
‘*But the serpent and the woman led him astray, and caused death to be inflicted 
upon him and upon all the inhabitants of the earth” ; Chald. Targum on Eccles. 
vii. 29. ‘* Jesse lived many days, until the counsel which the serpent gave to Eve 
was called to mind before God; on account of this counsel all men became subject 
unto death”; Zargum on Ruth iv. 22. 


166 The Fall and Original Sin  |CHAP. 


manner in which such consequences of the Fall were 
mediated to the race was ever definitely conceived, even in 
the talmudic age with which we have here chiefly been 
dealing. It has been seen, indeed, that the pollution of the 
serpent received by Eve, was held to have been physically 
propagated; and so far the Rabbis had a doctrine of inherited 
corruption of nature. Whether mortality was thus regarded 
as a physically transmitted inheritance, we cannot easily 
determine. The idea of the potential existence of the race 
in Adam, of which 5. Augustine made use, for all that a 
kindred conception was already formulated by the writer of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews', does not appear to have occurred 
to the ancient Rabbi; or, if it had occurred, does not appear 
to have been used in connexion with the universal con- 
sequences derived from Adam’s sin. The nearest approach 
to the doctrine that the race is included in Adam which can 
here be cited from at all ancient rabbinic tradition is supplied 
by the following passage from Schemoth Rabba*: “What is 
meant by ‘And it is known that it is man (Adam)’? (Exod. 
XXxi. I, 2 and, Eccl. vi. 10). When the first man was still an 
unformed mass, God let him see every single righteous man 
who should some time proceed from him; one hung from his 
head, another from his hair, the third from his forehead, the 
fourth from his eyes, the fifth from his nose, the sixth from 
his mouth, the seventh from his ears, the eighth from his jaws*.” 
And even this cannot be regarded as certainly embodying 
teaching belonging to the mishnic period. In later ages, no 
doubt, statements concerning the relation of the race to Adam 
similar to such as we call Augustinian, are to be met with in 
Jewish books. The Cabbalists certainly, as Dr Schechter says, 
evolved the whole of ideal humanity from the archetype Adam; 
and commentators of the modern period and of the middle 
ages frequently regarded our first parent as the sum of the 
race*. 

1 vil. 9, 10. 2c. 40. Wiinsche, S. 282. 

3 Cf. the saying of R. Chayim Vital, that the souls of two great teachers, 
Maimonides and Nachmanides, both sprang from the head of Adam (Schechter, 
Studies in Judaism). 


* The following instances may be given: 
“ΟἿ must not wonder that the sin of Adam and Eve was ascribed to after 


Vit] in Rabbinical Literature 167 


We have, however, been unable to discover one instance 
of the occurrence, in rabbinical literature previous to the close 
of the talmudic period, of the idea that Adam included in 
himself, potentially, the whole race, and that his sin was the 
sin of all mankind. 

This idea, dominant in the Western Church since the time 
of S. Augustine, was used as an expedient for justifying the 
attribution of guilt to all men for their inborn ‘sinfulness.’ 
In the absence of such an expedient among the Rabbis, it 
may be asked whether it was possible for them, when they 
taught, as they sometimes did, that men died on account of 
Adam’s sin, to regard mankind as participating in the guilt 
of that transgression? In other words, did they hold a 
doctrine of original, or inherited, guilt (Ardschuld)? Weber 
answers this question affirmatively in one place and negatively 
in another. So far as a conclusion may be drawn from the 


generations and sealed for them with the seal of the King. For just on the day in 
which the first man was created had everything been completed, and he is the 
completion of the structure and its totality; for on him was the world (i.e. the 
human world) founded. And when he sinned, the whole world sinned, and we 
have got to bear his sins....”’ Cadbdbalistic Commentary on the Pentateuch, by 
Menahem Rekanati (beginning of 14th century), ed. 1545, Venice; fol. 29, col. 1. 

‘““On account of the sin of Adam, who has caused death to himself and his 
seed after him to the end of all generations. [It is known from Nature that, when 
the root is struck and hurt, the branches suffer with it. So are the later generations 
the branches from the root (Adam).]” Berhai, Kad ha-gemach, Venice, 1546, 
fol. 5: a work written at the end of the 13th century. 

For the above two references the author is indebted to the kindness of a 
German scholar unknown to him; they were received through Prof. Pfleiderer 
of Berlin. 

The following passage is quoted in a work the reference to which has, unfor- 
tunately, been lost; its source was there said to be Zhe Two Tables of the Covenant, 
p. 5, col. 2: 

“¢Since the soul of Adam is the root of all souls, and from him all souls were 
spread out, therefore when death was decreed upon him, it was also decreed upon 
all that came out of him; for all were by his strength (or, proceeded by his 
power).” 

Tholuck, Umschreib. Uebersetzung des Briefes Pauli an die Romer, Deets, 
quotes from R. Mosche vy. Trana’s Beth Elohim, f. 105, c. 1 (15th century): 
ἐς With the same sin with which Adam sinned, sinned the whole world, for he was 
the whole world.” 

1S, 224 f. ‘Es gibt eine Erbschuld, aber keine Erbsiinde; der Fall Adams 
hat dem ganzen Geschlechte den Tod, nicht aber die Stindigheit 1m Stune einer 
Nothwendigheit 2u stindigen, verursacht.” Here, apparently, guilt is said to be 
inherited by Adam’s posterity because his punishment of death has passed over to 


168 The Fall and Original Sin  {CHAP. 


passages in which Adam’s sin is spoken of as the cause of 
human mortality, it would seem that they only meant to 
teach that the punishment alone, and not the guilt, of Adam’s 
sin was attached to the race. 

It only remains now to inquire whether rabbinical theology 
knew of any such conception as that of inherited inborn 
‘sinfulness,’ of a state of disharmony or corruption produced 
once and for all in human nature by the first transgression 
and transmitted by inheritance to all the human race. This 
is, of course, what is now generally understood by ‘original sin.’ 

We have seen already that Judaism possessed, apparently 
from very early times, a coarse physical theory of a pollution 
attaching to the race in consequence of the sin of Eve. Such 
a fact serves to show that the idea of inherited and inborn 
taint of sin, acquired at the very beginning of human history, 
did not emerge for the first time in the ecclesiastical doctrine 
of original sin. But it is very doubtful whether this Jewish 
fancy played at all an important part in the rabbinic doctrine 
of human sinfulness?. The moral nature of man was gener- 


them. On S. 249, however, we read: “" Adam’s Stinde tst ja nicht die Stinde des 
Geschlechts, sondern seine eigene. Der Mensch wird nicht zum Stinder vermége 
seiner Abstammung von Adam, sondern lediglich durch seine eigene That. Wee 
kann, wo die Stinde nicht auf das Geschlecht tibergeht, die Strafe der Stinde 
tibergehen? Wenn die Stinde und Schuld nicht erblich tst, kann dann die Strafe 
erblich sein?” In this passage Weber seems to imply that, inasmuch as mankind 
was not held, in rabbinical theology, to have participated in Adam’s sin, nor by 
descent from Adam to have inherited a sinful state, a difficulty is encountered when 
man’s subjection to death comes up for explanation. Mankind receive Adam’s 
punishment, but do of share or inherit his guilt. 

1 Prof. Stevens, in his work The Pauline 7heology, collects from Tholuck a 
few citations Which serve to illustrate comparatively modern Jewish teaching, but 
which are valueless as a guide to rabbinic doctrine at the beginning of the Christian 
era. The following may be reproduced here: 

“ΤᾺ Adam and Eve had not sinned, their descendants would not have been 
infected with the disposition to sin, and their form would have remained perfect 
like that of the angels, as the curses (upon them) show, and they would have 
continued eternally living.” 

This is quoted from ‘‘the mystical commentaries” by R. Shemtob, 13th century, 
in Sepher Haemunoth. 

The next passage is from R. Mayer Ὁ. Gabbai, Avodath Hakkodesch, {. 52: 
‘« Adam opened, through his fall, a source of impurity, so that impurity and poison 
spread themselves throughout the whole world.” 


Such doctrine as this was most probably borrowed by Jews from the Christian 
Church. 


ΝΠ] wn Rabbinical Literature 169 


ally discussed in terms of the conception of the good and 
evil yesers. And since Weber, in his already often quoted 
work, Fiidische Theologie, maintained that certain rabbinic 
sayings implied that the yezer hara was permanently strength- 
ened in mankind by the sin of Adam, it has become impossible 
fully to discuss the Jewish doctrine of the Fall without 
referring to the doctrine of the yezers. 

With this latter doctrine in general, indeed, we are not 
here concerned. The only question with regard to it which 
calls for consideration is, whether it supplied a view of man’s 
moral constitution such as was inconsistent with the explana- 
tion of human sinfulness in terms of an inherited propensity 
to evil introduced once and for all by Adam into our common 
nature, or whether it was ever actually so blended with the 
doctrine of the Fall as to furnish a means for expressing the 
moral consequences of that catastrophe for all subsequent 
generations of mankind. 

The doctrine of the yezer, and later, of the two yezers, 
originated and developed, of course, without any connexion 
with the doctrine of the Fall and its consequences. Its origin, 
moreover, was exegetical rather than speculative; and the 
earliest stages of its growth have been noticed in connexion 
with Ben Sira’s doctrine of sin. In the period in which the 
New Testament was written, the conception of the evil 
inclination must have been definite and widespread’, for it 
had been known to Ben Sira on the one hand, and was a 
commonplace with the Tannaim on the other. That it was 
a post-Christian rabbinic production has been abundantly 
disproved by the recovered fragments of the Hebrew of 


1 It was known to the writer of the apocalypse of Ezra. Dr Taylor suggests 
that the N.T. phrases διαλογισμὸς πονηρός (Matt. xv. 19), παλαιὸς ἄνθρωπος 
(Eph. iv. 22, 23), κρυπτὸς τῆς καρδίας ἄνθρωπος (1 Peter 11]. 4) are probably 
equivalents of yezer hava. Cf. also James i. 13—15. The doctrine of the yezer 
perhaps appears, in Stoic dress, in 4 Macc. ii. 21, where man’s inclinations are said 
to have been implanted by God, though the understanding was put on the throne 
over them; and in iii. 4, where reason is said to be not the extirpator, but the 
conqueror, of inclination. Again, in 7estament of Aser, 1, occurs the passage: 
δύο ὁδοὺς ἔδωκεν ὁ θεὸς υἱοῖς τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ δύο διαβούλια καὶ δύο πράξεις καὶ δύο 
τόπους καὶ δύο τέλη. Perhaps there is also an allusion to the yezer in Test. of 
Judah, 20. 


170 The Fall and Original Sin  [CHAP. 


Ecclesiasticus; that it was Hellenic in origin is also disproved 
by the fact that, in its earliest form, the conception of the evil 
yeser does not appear to have been correlated with the con- 
ception of a good yezer, so that the doctrine was not at first 
dualistic, and by the fact that the contrast between the good 
and the evil inclination, when it arose, was purely ethical, and 
did not imply a dualistic anthropology or metaphysic, such as 
many recent theologians consider Judaism to have borrowed 
from Hellenic thought?. Peps 
It is probable, if not certain, that the idea of the yezer Τοῦ, 
or good inclination, did not arise till a considerably later time 
than that at which the yezer hara had become a definite and 
well-known conception. The earliest rabbinical saying given 
by Bacher in which it occurs is one attributed to R. Jose the 
Galilaean, who lived in the earlier part of the second century’. 
It plays always a very inferior part, as compared with the 
yeser hara,in the discussions of the Rabbis on man’s moral 
nature. That both the good and the evil inclination were 
created by God was taught by R. Nachman Ὁ. Chisda*, who 
drew the inference from the fact that in Gen. ii. 7, where the 
creation of man is narrated, the word for ‘formed’ is written 
with two yods, implying the existence of two natures in man. 
That the evil vezer was the creation of God is taught in other 
passages also, and seems to have been the general belief* 
One of the most important of these is of interest because of 
its close similarity to Ecclus. xxi. 11: “I (God) created the 
evil yezer; but I created also the antidote for it, the torah®.” 
The Rabbis do not attempt to explain thoroughly the difficulty 
involved in regarding God as the creator of man’s evil impulse. 
Perhaps the conception of the good inclination was the result 
of the pressure of this difficulty ; but the introduction of that 


1 This is proved in Dr Porter’s able examination of the doctrine of the yezer 
hara, and of Weber’s very faulty representation of it; Azstorical and Critical 
Contributions to Brblical Science, New York and London, 1001. 

2 Die Agada der Tannaiten, Bd. 1. 5. 368. It occurs in the passage just 
cited from the Zestament of Aser, perhaps, for the first time. 

3 Beracoth, 61a. 

+ See Weber, of. cit., ὃ. 211, Porter, of. cit., ἢ. 117 ff. and a passage cited 
by Schechter, 7. Οἱ &. VII. pp. 195-6. 

> Kiddusch. 30b. 


vil]. in Rabbinical Literature Teal 


conception does not really solve the problem. Sometimes the 
evil yeser appears to have been regarded as not essentially 
evil. KR. Samuel Ὁ. Nachman understood the divine pro- 
nouncement that the creation was very good (Gen. i. 31) to 
include the evil impulse, and explained that this impulse was 
essential to the continuance of human life and business. This 
teaching, however, was exceptional. The general belief was 
that the yezer hara is essentially evil, and yet that, though 
man is responsible for intensifying it, its existence is due not 
to man but to God® 

Consequently it was not supposed that the evil impulse 
was in any sense a consequence of Adam’s sin. At least this 
was certainly not the general view. Weber gives no instance 
of such a belief; and Dr Porter, in his recent exhaustive 
discussion of the doctrine of the yeser hara, says: “It does 
not appear that its rise was traced to Adam’s sin.” This 
writer then mentions the passage from Zanchuma, to which 
reference has just been made; but even this does not refer to 


. the Fall, but to the sinfulness of mankind in general, as the 


cause of the evil nature of the yezer. There is one instance, 
however, of the occurrence of this opinion in rabbinical 
literature, viz. in the second recension of the Adoth az 
R. Nathan*®, where it is said that the seventh of the ten 
punishments decreed against Adam was: “There shall be in 
him the yezer kara.” This statement, so far as we know, is 
unique; and, even if it were a genuine saying of R. Nathan, 
it would only date from the second century. The nearest 
parallel to it which we have been able to discover is afforded 
by Raschi’s exegesis of Isai. v., where the allegory of the 
vineyard is applied to Paradise and the history of its two 
inhabitants. The following fragment may be quoted: “‘ And 


1 Beresch. Rabba, c. 9. 

“In Zanchuma, Gen. iii. 22, a late source, it is stated that man, and not God, 
made the yezer evil. 

The essentially evil character of the yezer ara is implied in passages which 
represent the patriarchs, David and others, as not having been under its dominion ; 
see, e.g., Baba Bathra, τῇ ἃ. 

ὅς, 41, ed. Schechter. This recension is only to be found in Dr Schechter’s 
edition of the Adoth at R. Nathan. The author is indebted, for the reference, to 


Dr Schechter himself. 


172 The Fall and Original Sin (CHAP. 


gathered out the stones thereof, 2.5. the yezer hara, until he 
ate of the tree, and then entered into him the yezer hara,... 
‘but there shall come up briars and thorns,’ ze. the yeser hara 
shall prevail in him and in his posterity after him!” Here 
the yezer is supposed to have been in man at the first, to have 
been removed from him in the state of innocence, and to 
have been implanted in him again after his transgression. 

The solitary instance of the occurrence, in literature of 
the talmudic period or thereabouts, of the belief that the 
yezer hara was implanted as a punishment for the first sin, 
only serves to prove that as a rule this opinion was not held; 
it was not a common tradition. 

Weber has maintained that a somewhat similar, though 
quite distinct view, is to be gathered from several passages in 
the literature with which we are here concerned. According 
to him, the Fall was supposed by the Rabbis to have increased 
(permanently) the intensity of the evil impulse which was 
previously only dormant. Thenceforth it gained a lasting 
ascendancy in Adam and in his posterity, and could only be 
resisted with the greatest effort? If this be a true interpre- 
tation of the views of the Jewish teachers with regard to the 
effect of the Fall upon man’s moral constitution, it is plain 
that they held a theory which was equivalent to that of 
S. Augustine, though expressed in different language. The 
permanent ascendancy of the evil impulse, brought about 
once and for all in mankind by the sin of Adam, is practically 
identical with the corruption of our nature asserted by Christian 
theology. Weber’s statements have been adopted by subsequent 
writers; and, on the strength of them, a doctrine of inherited 
taint, conceived in terms of the conception of the evil impulse, 
has been attributed to S. Paul, who is supposed to imply, in 
the well-known passage Rom. v. 12 ff., and perhaps elsewhere, 
the doctrine which Weber regarded as current in rabbinical 
theology. 


1 Raymund Martin, Pugio Fidei, ed. Voisin, Paris, 1651, fol. 473. Raschi 
wrote in the rith or r2th century, so that the above citation is no certain witness 
to ancient rabbinical opinion. 


ΩΣ 


* OP. Cites 6 213, 216, 324. 


ΝΠ] 22 Rabbinical Literature 173 


It is therefore of some importance to examine the chief 
references on which Weber based his view. 

When describing the rabbinic accounts of the unfallen 
state of man’, Weber quotes a saying of R. Jose which refers 
to woman having been the cause of Adam’s death and loss of 
innocence, from which he deduces that the yezer hara, though 
present in Adam from the first, was only a sensuous impulse, 
in itself morally indifferent; as yet it was but dormant 
(rzhte). After the Fall, however, it is subsequently stated, 
the yezer became more irrepressible, because, when the 
present condition of man is in question, it is frequently called 
‘a king?’ 

Now the saying of R. Jose which speaks of Adam’s lost 
innocence does not mention the yezer fara, and it is gratuitous 
to identify innocence in general with non-activity of the yeger 
which is elsewhere said by Rabbis, when not thinking specially 
of the unfallen nature of Adam, to have been in him from the 
first. Further, if the yeser acquired its might in consequence 
of the Fall, how came the first sin itself to be committed? 
And if, as the Rabbis seem generally to have held, the period 
between Adam’s creation and his sin was only a few hours, 
we can hardly credit them with any definite conception of 
the unfallen nature of man such as Christian theologians 
elaborated ; certainly they could hardly have conceived that 
state in terms of ideas such as those of the quiescence or 
importunity of the yeszer. In fact there are no rabbinical 
statements as to the behaviour of Adam’s yeser before his 
fall, and it is useless to draw inferences on the point from 
mere general statements that he was made in the image of 
God, and was at first pure. 

And it would seem to be equally mistaken to infer that, 
because the evil impulse in man, as he now is, is frequently 
stated to be very powerful, or to have acquired the ascen- 
dancy, this is characteristic of him as fallen, and denotes 
a result of the Fall, unless the distinction between the fallen 
and the unfallen state is contemplated in the context in which 


ΟΣ 5, 215: 
5. S. 216, and 224; see below. 


174 The Fall and Original Sin |CHAP. 


the violence of the yezer is described. This condition is 
wanting, however, in each of the passages of which Weber 
made use. They one and all describe the evil impulse as it 
is known by actual experience, and simply assert that it is 
very powerful. Its supremacy is a matter of observation, 
not a deduction from any view as to the effects of Adam’s 
sin}, 

On the other hand, “the doctrine that God made man 
with both good and evil instincts and dispositions, and that it 
is man, not God, who made the evil prevail, is sometimes 
expressed, though it cannot be the original form of the 
doctrine, and never appears to be accepted as a sufficient 
account of man’s moral condition®.” But when it was taught 
that man is responsible for the greater power of his evil 
yeser, it is the individual man that is meant; each one, 
through yielding to his inclination and not seeking with 
sufficient diligence to overcome it, has caused its increase of 


1 The following are three of the chief passages to which Weber refers (S. 224) 
when emphasising the ascendancy ascribed to the yezer hara in connexion with 
the consequences of the Fall. The others will be found, on perusal, to be equally 
irrelevant to the conclusion which is extracted from them. 

Bammidbar Rabba, c. 15 on X. 2 (Wiinsche, 5. 402): ‘‘ Und der Konig” d. i. 
der gute Trieb herrsche (sei Konig) iiber den bésen Trieb, welcher K6nig genannt 
wird, wie es heisst, Koh. Ix. 4; ‘‘ Und es kommt iiber sie ein grosser Konig und 
umzingelt sie.” 

S. 405, ‘‘ Herr der Welt! du kennst die Macht des bésen Triebes, dass er sehr 
arg ist.” 

Koheleth Rabba (tv. 13). Wiinsche, S. 64: ‘‘ Unter dem diirftigen, aber weisen, 
Jiingling ist der gute Trieb zu verstehen. Warum heisst derselbe aber Jiingling? 
Weil er im Menschen erst vom dreizehnten Jahre an sich regt.... Und dem alten 
thorichten Konig dagegen ist der bése Trieb zu verstehen. Warum heisst derselbe 
Konig? Weil ihm alle gehorchen. Warum ist er alt? Weil er mit dem Menschen 
von seiner Jugend bis zu seinem Alter sich zu schaffen macht.” 

S.131. ‘Oder: ‘Eine kleine Stadt’ d. i. der Korper, ‘die Manner’ ας i. seine 
Glieder ‘sind wenig,’ ‘es kommt ein grosser Konig’ d. i. der bose Trieb, der 
deshalb gross genannt wird, weil er dreizehn Jahre alter ist, als der gute Trieb, der 
sich erst in diesem Alter regt, ‘er umgiebt sie und legt grosse Bollwerke an’ d. i. 
Verstecke und Irrwege, ‘es fand sich ein armer, aber weiser, Mann’ d. i. der gute 
Trieb, der darum arm genannt wird weil er sich nicht bei allen Menschen findet, 
und die meisten ihm nicht gehorchen.” 

Part of this last piece of exegesis occurs in Medarim, 32b (Wiinsche, Aad. 
Talmud, 11. 1. 204). 

2 Porter, of. cit., p. 118. 


δ ον EE: eS eee 


vit] 222 Rabbinical Literature 175 


might. The ascendancy of the evil over the good yezer is 
a universally acquired habit, not a hereditary disease. 

Again, talmudic literature insists on a man’s capacity to 
control his evil inclination, mighty as it is. There is no hint 
that his free-will is diminished in consequence of the sin of 
his first parents; and herein lies the main difference between 
the spirit of the teaching of the Synagogue and that of the 
Church. The Rabbis recognised, of course, the general sinful- 
ness of humanity, but yet maintained the theoretical possi- 
bility of sinlessness, and indeed held that in some cases this 
had actually been attained 1, 

In so far, then, as the actual sinfulness of mankind is 
accounted for in rabbinic literature by the conception of the 
yeser hara, it is explained without reference to the Fall and 
the heredity of its consequences. The evil impulse was 
implanted by God in Adam, whose sin it caused?, and it 
appears to have been conceived as similarly implanted in 
every individual child of Adam. The yezer hava was not 
held to have its seat in the body, as distinguished from the 
soul, in spite of figurative expressions which describe its 
situation ; and therefore, as the Rabbis were not traducianists, 
it could not have been thought to be propagated, like the 
original sin, or fault of nature, of Christian theology, by 
physical inheritance. Indeed various opinions were held as 
to whether it arose in the individual before or after birth. 
It was said that the evil inclination is thirteen years older 

1 See above, p. 164. The sinlessness of Reuben, the sons of Eli (!), David 
and Solomon was maintained by one ingenious Rabbi (see Sabbath, 55 b—56 a), 
and R. Eleazar taught that ‘‘he who dwells in the land of Israel abides without 
iniquity”; but one must not take such doctrines too seriously. A more typical 
representative of the characteristics of early rabbinic teaching was Akiba, who held 
sin to be a consequence of free-will (Sashedr. 57), mocked at the idea of one’s 
incapacity for self-mastery (Azddusch. 81a), and identified Elihu, for his bewailing 
the frailty of man, with Balaam (/erus. Sota, 5). From Lrudin, 13b (see also 
Kohler, 7. Q. &. VII. 603), we gather that the school of Hillel took a brighter 
view of man, with all his shortcomings, than that of the school of Schammai, 
whose pessimism meets us also in 4 Ezra and other apocalypses of the same 
period. 

53 The evil yezer, after being personified into an external agency, regarded as 
sitting at the door of the heart, came to be identified sometimes with Satan (Bava 


Bathra, 16a); and it was asserted (/oma, 69 Ὁ) to have been the (external) tempter 
of Adam to his fall. 


1γό The Fall and Original Sin |CH. vil 


than the good; after thirteen years the good inclination 
reveals itself*. In the same context it is asked how a man 
shall free himself from the evil yezer ‘which is in his bowels’; 
“for his very conception is due to the yezer hara, which 
strengthens itself till the time comes for him to leave his 
mother’s womb, and at that moment it is already dwelling at 
the entrance of his heart.” Elsewhere the activity of the 
yezer is said to begin after birth; but even the passage just 
quoted (in abridged form), though strongly suggesting physical 
transmission of the yezer, xeed not be so interpreted. 

It must be concluded, then, that the only consequences of 
the Fall, for the human race, which were asserted in rabbinic 
teaching, are death and loss of the various supernatural 
adornments of Adam’s life at its beginning. No diminished 
freedom of will, no permanent ascendancy of the yezer hara 
established for all generations, were ascribed to the first 
transgression. Nor do we find any reference to the idea of all 
the race being in Adam, or identified with Adam, when he 
sinned. Judaism possessed, indeed, the legend of the pollu- 
tion of Eve by Satan, and of the taint transmitted by her to 
her posterity. But this belief, though widespread, does not 
appear to have served the purpose of an explanation of 
universal sinfulness. Whether the defilement was understood 
to be of a moral kind is not made plain; but this fanciful 
story witnesses to the existence, in rabbinic circles, of a series 
of ideas which bear some sort of similarity to those which 
constitute the doctrine of original sin and hereditary infection 
of nature. 


* * * * * 


NoTE. The student interested in the curious Jewish fancies con- 
cerning the details of the Fall-story will find ancient traditions, having 
much in common with those collected in the succeeding chapters from 
ancient apocalyptic writings, in the late works Sepher-ha-yvaschar (8th—oth 
cent.), translated in Migne, Dictionnatre des Apocryphes, Tome 11. 
1069 ff., and in the still later Chronicles of Jerahmeel, translated in 
ον ΙΝ NeWaseres νῦν. 


1 Aboth di R. Nathan, 16. 


Cla vale TBO AAU E 


THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN IN JEWISH 
PSEUDEPIGRAPHICAL LITERATURE. 


THE last class of Jewish writings to be examined for the 
roots of New Testament and ecclesiastical teaching, with 
regard to the Fall and to its consequences for the human race, 
is the pseudepigraphic, which consists mainly of apocalypses. 
There is no room for doubt that these writings were more 
nearly akin than those examined in the two preceding chapters, 
both in tone and in doctrine, to the literature of the New 
Testament, and of the early Church. The exposition of their 
teaching with regard to human sinfulness will serve to illus- 
trate the truth of this assertion for some, at least, of them. 

It is too remote from the purpose of the present work to 
attempt a detailed account of what has been thought as to 
the origin of Jewish apocalyptic literature. A few statements 
must suffice to differentiate its origin, subject-matter and 
standpoint from those of other Jewish writings, in so far as 
this is possible. This class of literature has seemed to certain 
writers to have roots in Essenism?. Some authorities em- 
phasise the possibility that foreign influences stimulated the 
growth of its characteristic ideas and supplied models for its 
method. Gunkel has argued that it contains ancient traditional 
elements of mythical nature, preserved in folk-lore.. These 


1 See Porter in Hastings’ Dict. of the Bible, 1. p. 113; Hilgenfeld, Die Jtidische 
A pokalypitk, etc. 
2 Schipfung und Chaos, etc.; see also Bousset, The Anti-Christ Legend. 


i. ΤᾺ 


178 The Fall and Original Sin |CHAP. 


elements, in part at least, have been said to be Babylonian}, 
Other scholars? have pointed to Mazdeism for the source 
of certain apocalyptic ideas. Yet again, in consequence of 
the opinion that no models, from which apocalyptic writings 
may have been derived, are known in Persian literature, 
Greece and Egypt have been thought to have more probably 
supplied the external conditions which gave shape to some 
of the characteristics of this class of writings*. Possibly there 
is truth in all these views; but the extent to which foreign 
influences had been at work in stimulating the flow of apoca- 
lyptic literature is as yet uncertainly known. There can be 
little doubt, however, that although it was not, perhaps, wholly 
indigenous to Judaism, and not entirely a product of the 
Jewish native genius, it was a direct outgrowth, in some 
respects at least, from later prophecy, and a development of 
tendencies already exhibited in canonical books of the Old 
Testament. In Isaiah, Ezekiel and Zechariah, for instance, 
we find passages which, in respect of both subject-matter and 
treatment, 2.5. eschatology and visionary revelations, approach 
the character of the literature distinguished as apocalyptic ; 
and the book of Daniel is an immediate precursor of the 
whole class of such writings, if not contemporary with some 
of them. 

There is no extant example of this kind of literature, after 
the close of prophecy, until about the Maccabean age, the 
events of which are supposed to have been a cause of literary 
activity in this direction. The felt need of something more 
akin than official scribism to those elements of prophecy 
which dealt with the future of Israel, and which should solve 
pressing difficulties suggested by the apparent non-fulfilment 
of the prophets’ predictions of Israel’s destiny, led to that 
revival of one side of prophecy in which the work of the 
pseudepigraphical writers may be said largely to consist. 

But in offering a forecast of the future, these writers some- 
times attempted a review of the divine plan in the past 
history of the race as a whole, and thus supplied a rough 


1 Beer, in Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen, S. 233. 
2 Kohler, Jew. Quart. Review, V. 405. 
3 See Torrey, in Jew. Encyclopaedia, Art. Apocalyptic Literature. 


vu] 2722 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings τ79 


attempt at what might, with a generous stretch of meaning, 
be called a philosophy of history. In order to include the 
future, they review the past; and, in doing so, they try to 
satisfy curiosity more completely than was done by the 
‘historical’ element in the Mosaic Law pure and simple. 
They profess to disclose the secret things of the distant 
past as well as of the future, and, amongst them, the history 
of the first men and the beginnings of sin. They afford a 
doctrinal interpretation of passages of the Old Testament 
which were originally founded on mythical legend, whose 
earlier significance had been forgotten and was now irre- 
coverable, because the methods of historical criticism and 
scientific exegesis were foreign to their age. They thus serve 
to illustrate, more conspicuously, perhaps, than other Jewish 
writings, how, when doctrinal exegesis of the ancient records 
commenced, it proceeded from the first upon the wrong tack. 
For these reasons the pseudepigrapha are of importance to 
our investigation. 

For the purpose of supplying knowledge on such matters 
as those which have just been named, the apocalyptist would 
seem to have drawn from the national stock of tradition 
which the Old Testament .had by no means exhausted, 
owing chiefly to the fact that it rigorously excluded all 
save such as was, or could be made, most edifying, and 
lent itself most readily to sacred use. It is not surprising 
thus to meet with a reappearance of mythical, or rather 
legendary, material at a date subsequent to that of the latest 
books included in the canon: of ancient material enriched 
with newly invented additions and embellishments, as well 
as with elements borrowed from foreign sources’. It is not 
easy to ascertain, in many cases, which details are probably 
survivals of ancient myth amongst the larger quantity which 
are undoubtedly products of the fancy and imagination of 
the writer or of the circle which he represented. But the 
expansions of biblical narrative with which we meet in the 
apocalyptic books are of the nature of haggada*, and grew 

1 See Beer, Das Buch der Jubilaen. 


2 See arts. by Kohler on Pre-Talmudic Haggada in Jew. Quart. Review, 
v. and VII. ' 


es 


790 Ὁ The Fall and Original Sin |CHAP. 


largely out of the same roots as that of the talmudic literature. 
The pseudepigraphic writings are in fact a branch of haggada. 
It was once more usual than it appears to be now for writers, 
especially Jewish writers, sharply to dissociate the apocalyptic 
from the talmudic literature; to regard the former kind as 
off the lines of orthodox thought and official teaching, and as 
devoid of importance in the history of Judaism’. It 15 true, 
of course, that the pseudepigraphical writings were never 
sanctioned by the official Judaism of the talmudists; but this 
is probably due, at least in part, to the fact that these writings 
were largely adopted by the Christian Church®. They form 
a valuable, and indeed indispensable, guide to the peopular 
religious beliefs of their time, to the ‘ folk-faith’ of the Jewish 
people ; and they express much of the current speculation of 
provincial, but generally orthodox, Pharisaism. It is an 
exaggeration to say that they represent a mere fringe, and 
not at all the dominating thought and speculation of their 
time. 

Many authorities are now able to endorse the words of 
Schiirer?: “Der Standpunkt aller dieser Schriften ist im 
wesentlichen der correct Jidische.” 

Assuming, then, that the pseudepigraphical books repre- 
sented the mind of the more earnest and inwardly religious 
scribes, the soil in which Christianity most naturally took 
root, and that they were studied, esteemed and produced 
within orthodox Pharisaic circles, we have now to collect 
such passages from them as illustrate the development of 
Jewish speculation and exegesis on the subject of the Fall 
and its consequences for mankind. At present these writings 
will be examined separately and in order, for the teaching 
which they severally offer, in so far as it is relevant to our 


1 As, δι.) Jost (Geschichte des Judenthums, Bd. 11. S. 218); Gratz; Weber 
(Jiid. Theologie, 1897, S. xv); Montefiore (Hzbbert Lectures). 

2 Dr Schechter has expressed the doubt whether these writings were so much 
as heard of by the Rabbis. It is very astonishing that the rabbinical literature 
should teem with elements of haggada identical in the minutest particulars, 
however fanciful and grotesque, with such as we meet with in these apocalypses. 

3 Geschichte des jiidischen Volkes, Bd. τι. 8.) 612; cf. Baldensperger, Das 
Selbstbewusstsein Jesu; Stanton, The Christian and the Jewish Messiah; Torrey, 
Joc. cit., and other English writers. 


vu] 22 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 181 


inquiry. To the classification, according to subject-matter, 
of the teaching so derived—together with that yielded by the 
classes of literature previously discussed—another chapter 
must be devoted, in the hope that, in spite of the repetition 
so involved, some slight service may thereby be rendered to 
the student of the history of doctrine. 


Ι. The (Aethtopic) Book of Enoch. 


The Book of Enoch is recognised to be a redaction of 
several writings of different authorship and date. The 
portion which is usually called its groundwork, consisting of 
cc. i—Xxxvi., lxxii—civ., is generally assigned to.the second 
century B.c.; and there is considerable agreement that 
cc. i—xxxvi., the oldest part of this groundwork, date from 
a time earlier than 167 B.C. The exact analysis of this 
composite work, and the dating of its several sections, cannot 
yet be taken as finally settled; but we may safely assume 
that the most ancient portion of the apparently composite 
groundwork contains the earliest extant apocalyptic writing’. | 
For this reason the Look of Enoch is here examined first 
in order. 


(a) The Groundwork. 


The groundwork, consisting of cc. i—xxxvi. ]xii—civ. 
(save interpolations), is of interest because it contains an elabo- 
rate development of the ancient elohim-legend embodied in 
Gen. vi. I-4, concerning the descent to earth of the ‘sons of 
God,’ and, as will presently be argued, it traces the sinfulness 
of the world to this event. These celestial beings are not 
called ‘sons of God’ in Enoch, but ‘sons of the heavens,’ 


1 It implies the existence of a considerable literature similar in character and 
earlier in date. 

Prof. Charles’s mode of division of the whole Book of Enoch is here followed as 
a matter of convenience to English readers, and his translation has been cited 
throughout this chapter. In this author’s Zhe Book of Enoch, 1893, guidance will 
be found to the views of critics who hold different opinions as to the subdivision 
and date of the constituents of the apocalypse. These questions have been more 
recently discussed by Beer in Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen des A.T. A new 
Aethiopic text, and a German translation of the book (to be followed by notes), 
have recently been supplied by Flemming and Radermacher. 


182 The Fall and Original Sin [CHAP. 


‘sons of the holy angels’ or ‘watchers. We may compare 
the rendering ἄγγελοι τοῦ θεοῦ of the LXX. and of Philo 
(De Gigant.): “une modification des expressions de la Gen.,” 
as M. Lods? has said, “destinée ἃ la fois ἃ expliquer les 
termes bibliques et a leur enlever ce quiils avaient de 
choquant pour le judaisme de |’époque grecque, si jaloux dela 
transcendence divine.” 

The object of the watchers in coming to earth was to 
possess themselves of human wives. These they “taught 
charms and enchantments, and made them acquainted with 
the cutting of roots and of woods.” The offspring of 
such unions were giants, which “turned themselves against 
mankind in order to devour them,” so that “the earth com- 
plained of the unrighteous ones®.” The teaching of the arts 
to men by the angels is described with fuller detail in some 
(interpolated) verses of c. viii. Azazel taking the most 
prominent part. A little later we read : “See then what Azazel 
hath done, how he hath taught all unrighteousness on earth 
and revealed the secret things of the world which were 


1 Le Livre da’ Henoch, p. 104. 

Charles (27. /oc.) referring to Delitzsch, Mew Commentary on Genesis, where 
analogy between Gen. vi. r—4 and the Avesta ( Yasna 1x. 46) is mentioned, seems 
to believe that the original Hebrew myth of the descent of the sons of God was 
derived from Persia. ‘This is improbable to the last degree, partly because of the 
lack of contact with Persia before the time of J, and also because the legend 
appears, as W. R. Smith believed, to be Semitic and of extreme antiquity. 
Delitzsch does not suggest a Persian origin. Persian influence may well have 
directed the development which the old legend received at the hands of the 
apocalyptic writers, however. Certainly there is a great difference between the 
treatment which the biblical story receives in Zoch (and other apocalyptic writings) 
and its incidental usage in passages such as Ecclus. xvi. 7, Wisd. xiv. 6, 3 Macc. 
ii. 4, Bar. iil. 26. Philo’s application of it is, of course, quite off the lines of 
Judaism, and Josephus was doubtless familiar with the developed form of the 
legend, which, it is interesting to note, he calls a tradition; Av#z. 1. iii. 1, 
*‘For many angels of God formed connexions with women, and begat sons that 
were violent, and despisers of all that was good, on account of the confidence they 
had in their strength; for the tradition is, that their acts resembled the daring of 
those whom the Greeks call giants.” : 
°c. vi. These seem to be two cycles of tradition interwoven in this and 
the following chapters: in the one Semjaza is leader of the fallen angels, who 
bound the others by an oath to join in the sin; in the other Azazel is the chief. 
Passages of the former kind are considered to be interpolations; see Charles, 
in loc. With c. vi. cf. xv. 3 ff. 


| 


vi] 22. Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 183 


wrought in the heavens?” But human sin is still more 
definitely ascribed to the fallen angels in the following 
chapter: “And heal the earth which the angels have defiled, 
and proclaim the healing of the earth, that I will heal the 
earth, and that all the children of men shall not perish 
through all the secret things that the watchers have disclosed 
and have taught their sons. And the whole earth has been 
defiled through the teaching of the works of Azazel: to him 
ascribe all the sin®” 

The passages so far referred to in the groundwork imply 
that the angels descended to earth from lust, their descent 
presupposing, or being, a moral ‘fall’ ‘They further imply 
that the watchers were the cause of all human corruptness; 
this corruption of the world being at the same time closely 
connected with, or mediated through’®, the introduction of 
hidden knowledge and the initiation of progress in arts and 
science. It is of interest to note that Gen. vi. is here more 
closely followed than in the Book of Jubilees and the Testa- 
ments of the XII Patriarchs*, where a different reason is given. 
According to the latter of these writings the angels are led 
astray by the women of earth. This last idea is also ap- 


' parently implied in a passage in the groundwork of Lxoch, 


Bases ὁ: 

2 x. 7, 8. Cf. xiii. 2, ‘‘ because of the oppression which thou hast taught, and 
because of all the works of blasphemy, oppression and sin which thou hast shown 
to the children of men.” . 

Attention must be called to the note of Lods (of. ci¢., p. 110) on Azazel. He 
regards cc. vi—viii., in which Azazel was merely one of Semjaza’s band, as 
having been ‘retouched’ (cf. Charles’s view) ; for in the rest of the book he plays 
a different 7é/e, being responsible for all human sin because he introduced evil by 
revealing the mysteries of heaven (not the manufacture of weapons etc., ascribed 
in vili. 1 to Azazel, but in lxix. 6 to Gadreel). He is elsewhere not associated 
with the angels who descended through lust, and is spoken of not as having taught 
the women enchantments, but as having taught mankind generally. In Yalkut 
Schim., Beresch., 44, Azazel and Semjaza descended for the purpose ascribed to 
them in Zoch vi., but Azazel returned without accomplishing his crime. 

3 See esp. xvi. 2, 3: ‘‘And now as to the watchers who have sent thee to 
intercede for them, who had been aforetime in heaven, (say to them,) ‘you have 
been in heaven, and though the hidden things had not yet been revealed to you, 
you knew worthless mysteries, and these in the hardness of your hearts you have 
recounted to the women, and through these mysteries women and men work much 
evil on earth.’” 

* See below. 


184 The Fall and Original 5122. |CHAP. 


which, for other reasons, is regarded by Charles as an inter- 
polation in the present text’. 

Another stratum of the groundwork of the Book of Enoch, 
believed by Charles and other critics to have been due to 
different authors from that of cc. i—xxxvi., consisting of 
cc. Ixxxiii—xc. and dating from the 2nd cent. B.C., lays stress 
upon the story of the fallen angels. In his first dream-vision 
Enoch says: “And now the angels of Thy heavens trespass 
(against Thee) and Thy wrath abideth upon the flesh of men 


until the great day of judgment®.” In the second vision 


“the writer gives a complete history of the world from Adam 
down to the final judgment and establishment of the Messi- 
anic kingdom. After the example of the Book of Daniel men 
are symbolised by animals;...the fallen watchers by stars*.” 
While nothing is said of Adam’s sin, it is distinctly taught, 
though the teaching is conveyed chiefly in figurative dress, 
that the corruption of the earth which brought down the 
punishment of the Deluge—the first great world-judgment, 
was due, not to the sin of man, but to that of the angels who 
came down‘, 


1 xix. 2: “And with their women also who led astray the angels of heaven it 
will fare in like manner with their friends.” 

The verse which precedes this is of interest : ‘‘ Here will stand the angels who 
have connected themselves with women, and their spirits assuming many different 
forms have defiled mankind and will lead them astray into sacrificing to demons as 
gods...’’; (i) because of its mention of sacrifice to demons as being introduced by 
the fallen angels, and the inconsistency of this (see Charles, 27 loc.) with cc. x. Xvi. ; 
(2) because of its witness to the belief that the spirits assumed different forms, and 
not only human bodies (752. Reuben, 5), in order to enter into relation with the 
human race. M. Lods (of. cit. p. 164 f.) refers to Aiddusch. 81 a (Weber, 
S. 243), where Satan is said to have appeared sometimes in the form of a beautiful 
woman, sometimes in that of a beggar. Cf. ΖΦ πολ lxix. 6; perhaps the identi- 
fication of the serpent with Satan in late Jewish literature (Wisd. ii. 23 and 
N. Test.) is a consequence, and particular application, of this new-Hebrew belief. 

ΔἸ τ εν ed : 

3 Charles, p. 227. See cc. lxxxvi—lxxxviii. 

4 In xcvili. 4, a chapter which, according to Charles, belongs to yet another 
distinct layer of the groundwork, occurs a statement which has sometimes been 
taken to be inconsistent with the prevailing doctrine of this book as to the angels 
being the cause of sin in the human world: ‘ Even so sin has not been sent upon 
the earth, but man himself has created it, and into great condemnation will those 
fall who commit it.” But the instigation of the watchers, who showed mankind 
how to sin, would in any case require voluntary cooperation and acquiescence on 


vii] 2722 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 185 


These passages are of interest because they reveal a line 
of fanciful semi-gnostic speculation parallel to, but essentially 
different from, that which connected the sinfulness and cor- 
ruption of the world with the transgression of the first parents 
of the race. Whatever may have been the original meaning 
of the legend contained in the opening verses of Gen. vi., or 
that which the Jahvist writer intended them to convey, there 
can be little doubt that they were used by the writers of the 
groundwork of #xzoch in the 2nd century B.C. not only as 
a biblical account of a fall of angels, but also as an explanation 
of the entrance of sin into the world, and therefore as the 
cause of the corruptness of the human race. The view of 
M. Lods, that the Book of noch does not seek for an ex- 
planation of the origin of evil in its account of the fallen 
angels’, cannot here be accepted. Not only are philosophy 
of history and theodicy problems with which apocalyptic 
literature in general was largely concerned, but they appear 
with great prominence in the portions of the Look of Enoch 
which we have been considering. The influence of the 
watchers is repeatedly connected with the prevalence of 
human sin, and human sin with divine judgments and the 
ordering of the world’; so that the frequent and copious 


the part of those whom they seduced, and this is all that is condemned in the 
verse before us. Judaism invariably insisted on man’s freedom, however it may 
have regarded sin to have been ‘introduced.’ In one version of the story of the 
watchers (see above), the women are regarded as having taken the initiative in 
wrong-doing. 

Thus, whether in the verse ch. c. 4: ‘* And in those days the angels will descend 
into the secret places and will gather into one place all those who brought down 
sin,” we read “‘ who brought down sin” (with Charles), or ‘‘who aided sin” (with 
Beer, who follows other Mss.), is unimportant so far as doctrine is concerned. 

1 of. ctt, p. 103 f.: ‘*L’auteur ne cherche pas dans la chute des anges une 
explication du mal sur la terre (voyez 98, 4). S’il la raconte, c’est en premier 
lieu parce qu’il s’intéresse pour eux-mémes ἃ ces étres supérieurs, anges et démons, 
qui occupent une place si envahissante dans les préoccupations de ses contempo- 
rains; mais c’est aussi parce qu’il y trouve un exemple particulitrement saisissant 
de la justice de Dieu, qu’aucune grandeur ne saurait arréter.”’ 

2 In Ixxx. 2-8 the writer regards the course of nature as dependent on, and 
modified by, man’s sin. The miscarriage of the functions of nature are, however, 
not attributed, as elsewhere in Jewish literature, to the Fall. Cf. ch. c. 11, which 
unlile the former passage, is not supposed to be an interpolation: ‘“‘And He will 
sumnon to testify against you cloud and mist and dew and rain ; for they will all 
be vithheld by you from descending upon you, and that because of your sins.” 


τ86 The Fall and Original Sin  |[CHAP. 


allusions to the ancient legend plainly serve a definite purpose 
and cannot be looked upon merely as an expression of the 
writers’ interest in demonology for itsown sake. The fall of the 
watchers is said, moreover, in one passage, to have been the 
cause of the existence of the post-diluvian demons on earth, 
and is connected therefore with present sin, as well as with 
that which provoked the Deluge. 

It is to be inferred, then, that we are presented in the 
oldest portions of the Book of Enoch with an alternative, 
perhaps a rival, theory as to the historical origin of human 
sin, to that which would account for it by Adam and Eve’s 
temptation and transgression. It is noteworthy that the 
eating of the tree of knowledge is but once alluded to in 
Enoch, and that only incidentally and without any doctrinal 
intention. In c. xxxii, 3 ff, Enoch narrates that when he 
came into the garden of: righteousness (ze. the earthly 
Paradise), he saw, amongst other trees, “the tree of wisdom, 
which imparts great wisdom to those who eat of it. And it is 
like the carob tree: its fruit is like the clusters of the vine, 
very beautiful: the fragrance of the tree goes forth and 
penetrates afar. And I said: ‘This tree is beautiful, and how 
beautiful and attractive is its look!’ And the holy angel 
Rafael, who was with me, answered me and said: ‘ This is the 
tree of wisdom, of which thy old father and thy aged mother, 
who were before thee, have eaten, and they learnt wisdom and 
their eyes were opened, and they recognised that they were 
naked, and they were driven out of the garden’’”, As 
Dr Charles has remarked on these verses, “Adam’s sin is not 
(here) regarded as the cause of man’s fall and destruction in 
the Deluge.” Indeed that sin seems to have been ignored 
in accounting for the universality of human corruptness. In 
the above passage the partaking of the tree is not even called 
a sin; and the garden of Eden, according to this book, “has 
no connexion with the destinies of mankind.” At this date, 
at least, the exegesis of the Fall-story which later held the 
field, both in Jewish and in Christian literature, was not of 


1 This is the earliest known interpretation of the tree of knowledge. (hat 
tree is regarded as imparting wisdom, etc. whem eaten. 


vu] 222 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 187 


exclusive and unequivocal authority even for a Palestinian 
writer with whom “the old Hebrew standpoint is fairly well- 
preserved?,” even if it was known to him at all. 

The groundwork of Ezoch alludes, in a similar incidental 
manner, to the tree of life of Gen. ii. iii.” Enoch finds it on 
“a mountain range of fire which flamed day and _ night,” 
magnificent with precious stones. On the seventh mountain 
was a throne encircled with fragrant trees, supreme amongst 
which was the tree of life. “It had a fragrance beyond all 
fragrance: its leaves and blooms and wood wither not for 
ever: and its fruit is beautiful, and it resembles the dates of 
a palm.” Enoch expresses his wish to know about this tree, 
whereupon Michael answers: “This high mountain which 
thou hast seen, whose summit is like the throne of the Lord, 
is His throne, where the Holy and Great One, the Lord 
of Glory, the Eternal King, will:sit, when He shall come 
down to visit the earth with goodness. And no mortal is 
permitted to touch this tree of delicious fragrance till the 
great day of judgment, when He shall avenge and bring 
everything to its consummation for ever; this tree, I say, 
will (then) be given to the righteous and humble. By its 
fruit life will be given to the elect; it will be transplanted to 
the north, the holy place, to the temple of the Lord, the 
Eternal King.” In the light of the growing Jewish faith 
in a future life, the earthly Paradise and the tree of life are 
transferred to a ‘new Jerusalem’; and the fruit of this tree is 
to confer, not immortality, but long life such as the patriarchs 
were endowed with*®. The whole conception of the tree of life 
is as materialistic as that in Genesis, and is the best guide, on 
account of the antiquity of the writing in which it occurs, 
to the Jahvist writer’s idea as to the functions and mode of 
action of the tree which he describes in his Paradise-story. 
That these details as to Paradise and its two trees should be 
recorded by the writer of cc. i—xxxvi. of the Book of Enoch, 


1 Charles, of. ctf. p. 55- 

=U OCH χεῖν,, XXVs 

3 xxv. 6: ‘Then will they rejoice with joy and be glad: they will enter the 
holy habitation: the fragrance thereof will be in their limbs, and they will live a 
long life on earth, such as thy fathers have lived.” 


188 The Fall and Original Sin  |CHAP. 


and yet no allusion whatever made to Adam’s sin as involving 
consequences for the race, although his mind is full of the 
sinfulness of the ante-diluvian world and its causes, must 
once more be declared to be remarkable, if not significant and 
suggestive. 


(6) The Simtlitudes, cc. xxxvii—lxx. 


In this portion of the apocalypse, much later, apparently, 
than the groundwork which has been examined, we find the 
origin of sin traced a stage further back. Evil spirits or 
satans are distinguished from the watchers or fallen angels, 
and are supposed to have existed as evil agencies before 
them. The fall of the watchers, in fact, is represented as due, 
not to a desire to unite with the daughters of men, but 
to their becoming subject to the satans’, a body of evil spirits 
whose existence is presupposed from the beginning. Thus 


whereas the older portions of the book, in their use of Azazel. 


(or Semjaza), fall back upon the nature-religion which the 
prophets had thrust into the back-ground, but which apoca- 
lyptists were rousing to new life’, the Similitudes employ the 
late-developed doctrine of Satan as more sufficing, and 
thereby carry the actual origin of evil further back. The 
story of the watchers is, however, retained as the explanation 
of the corruption of mankind*®. In the Similitudes, as in the 
groundwork, the origin of human sin and the basis for 
theodicy is still Gen. vi. I—4, not Gen. ii. iii, At least this 
is so if we may, with Charles, regard certain sections of 
cc. XXXvVil—Ixx. as interpolations, whether from a lost Noah- 
apocalypse or not‘. To these alleged interpolations it now 
remains for us to turn. 


1 liv. 6: ‘Michael, Gabriel, Rafael and Fanuel will take hold of them (the 
hosts of Azazel, v. 5) on that great day and cast them on that day into a burning 
furnace, that the Lord of Spirits may take vengeance on them for their unrighteous- 
ness in becoming subject to Satan and leading astray those who dwell on the 
earth.” 

2 See Stave, Hinfluss des Parsismus u.s.w., 5. 268. 

3 e.g. Ixiv. 2, ‘‘ These are the angels who descended to the earth, and revealed 
what was hidden to the children of men and seduced the children of men into 
committing sin.” 

4 The Palestinian Enoch-literature proper would thus seem to know of no 


ee 


vul] zz Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 1809 


(c) JLnterpolations. 


The passages which some critics regard as interpolations 
in the groundwork have already been examined in treating 
of that portion of the book. They do but supply minute 
variations of the legend of the fallen angels. 

But some of the extracts from an apocalypse of Noah 
which have found their way into the book of the Similitudes 
not only specify more fully the nature of the secret wisdom 
brought by the watchers!, and supply a demonology resem- 
bling that of the Secrets of Enoch rather than that of the rest 
of the apocalypse in which they have been incorporated’; 
they also refer to the Fall-story of Genesis. It is stated that 
the third chief among the angels, called Gadreel, “led astray 
Eve,” besides showing to men the weapons of war and 
death*. In the same chapter we read “for man was created 
exactly like the angels, to the intent that he should continue 
righteous and pure, and death which destroys everything 
could not have taken hold of him, but through this their 
knowledge they are perishing and through this power (of 
knowledge) it (death) is consuming me*” It would thus 
seem that the lost Noah-apocalypse, from which Charles 
regards this passage to be taken®, taught that man was 
originally immortal as well as innocent, and that death was 
introduced on account of his acquisition of knowledge and 
the sin connected therewith. But, once again, no use is made 


great sin affecting the race, or calling for a universal judgment, before the period 
immediately preceding the Deluge. Its world-history, in fact, takes its departure 
thence. In later apocalyptic writings this point of departure is superseded by the 
catastrophe of Adam and Eve, and the centre of gravity of the whole problem of 
sin is shifted to the point with which it ever afterwards remained identified. 

1 ¢.¢. Ixv. 6-8, lxix. 6-12. This knowledge included sorcery, extraction of 
metals, manufacture of idols and of implements of war; also writing, for the 
purpose of ‘‘ giving confirmation to good faith, with pen and ink.” 

2 See Morfill and Charles’s edition, p. 21, note to xviii. 3. 

3 lxix. 6. Hilgenfeld, of. ¢z¢., S. 159—60, sees in this verse and its context 
the implication of the idea (which he calls Gnostic), that the devil was father of 
Cain by Eve. See above, pp. 156 ff. 

SHIRIS eT I. 

5 See of. cit., and also Art. Noah, Book of, in Hastings’ Dict. of the Bible, 
vol. III. 


190 The Fall and Original Sin  [CHAP. 


of these statements; and they certainly deal in a very free 
manner with the story of Gen. iii., from the details of which 
they deliberately diverge. 

Thus the Book of Enoch supplies little material for, the 
history of the exegesis of the Paradise-story; but it shows 
that, even within the circle of Pharisaism, the doctrine of 
a fall of our first parents affecting the whole race was not the 
only current explanation of the origin of human sinfulness, if 
indeed such an explanation was known at all when the earlier 
portions of the book were written. 


Il. Zhe Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. 


This work is an example of haggadic midrash which, in 
all probability, was enriched with additions by an apocalyptic 
writer before its Christian interpolations were inserted. In 
its Jewish form it may well have been a product of the 
second or first century B.C., and therefore contemporary with 
portions of the composite Book of Enoch. Like that work, it 
contains allusions to the story of the descent of the angels. 
Thus in Zest. Reuben, v.,we find a curious variant of the usual 
tradition, making the daughters of men the seducers of the 
watchers, who changed themselves into men in order to have 
relations with them. In 7272, Dan., v.. occurs the passage : 
“and in every form of wickedness will the spirits of seduction 
be active among you,” which implies the biblical and com- 
moner form of the tradition, regarding the watchers as 
responsible for the guilt of the unnatural unions. Again 
in Zest. Naphthah, iii., we find allusion to the “spirits of 
seduction,” followed by the words: “likewise the watchers 
changed the natural use, whom the Lord also cursed before 
the Flood?.” These allusions point to the prominence of the 
legend in Jewish thought about sin, though they are not made, 

1 In Zest. Levt, 111., there is an allusion to the punishment of these watchers. 

Besides the other passages cited in this chapter which refer to the legend of 
the watchers, allusions are also found in the Zestament of Solomon, xxi., xxvi. 
(E. Trans. in Jew. Quart. Rev. X1.), a writing believed by Conybeare and others 
to have been the work of a Jew, like the Zests. of the XII. Patriarchs, and existing 


now in the form of a Christian recension. Josephus (Avz/z. I. iii. 1) also refers to 
the story. Cf. Jude 6; 2 Pet. ii. 4. 


vill] 7 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 1091 


in this writing, the basis for conclusions as to the cause or 
introduction of human sin: a subject with which the work is 
not at all concerned, though in Zest. Levz, xviii, Adam’s fall 
seems incidentally to be assigned an important place’. 


III. Zhe Book of /Jubilees. 


The Book of Jubilees* is not of great importance to the 
historian of the Jewish doctrine of the Fall. The work is 
not an apocalypse, but a haggadic commentary on Genesis 
written by a Pharisee of Palestine. Its date has not been 
unanimously agreed upon. It has been assigned to the reign 
of John Hyrcanus’, and to the first century A.D.‘; but the 
majority of critics place it in the latter half of the first 
century B.C. It is the earliest example of continuous hag- 
gadic treatment of O.T. narrative that we possess. 

The narratives of Genesis are reproduced in this book 
with a considerable amount of that fanciful amplification 
characteristic of all but the very earliest Jewish exegesis. 
This will be seen, to some extent, from its treatment of the 


Fall-story. 
First, however, the use which this book makes of the 
narrative of Gen. vi. I—4 may be briefly noticed. “The 


? 


angels of God which are called watchers” are said to have 
descended to earth in order to teach the children of men how 
to practise justice and righteousness on earth®. This appears 
to be a unique variation of the legend. It approaches to that 


1 Bousset, Dze Religion des Judenthums im N.T. Zettalter, cites as follows: 
(The Messiah) ‘‘ will open the gates of Paradise, and he will remove the sword 
which threatens Adam, and will give to the saints to eat of the tree of life.” 

It may be added here that the earliest known occurrence of the doctrine of the 
two yezers is in Test. Aser, i.: δύο ὁδοὺς ἔδωκεν ὁ θεὸς υἱοῖς τῶν ἀνθρώπων καὶ δύο 
διαβούλια. ... 

* See Charles, Art. Apocal. Literature in Encyclop. Bibl.; his translation 
of the book in Jew. Quart. Review, 1893-5; and his edition of The Book of 
Jubilees, 1902; Littmann, in Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen ; Ronsch’s, Singer’s, and 
Beer's Das Buch der Jubilaen. 

3 Kohler, on Pre- Talmudic Haggada, J7.Q.R., v. 

4 Singer, of. czt. 

Reivers. 


192 Lhe fall and Original Sin (CHAP. 


found in the Zestament of Reuben, but does not ascribe the 
initiative in evil to the daughters of men. According to 
Fubilees, it was only later that the watchers began to sin by 
marrying with the women’. This was the cause of ‘corrup- 
tion of the way’ of all flesh, man and beast?, and of the 
accumulated sin which called down the judgment of the 
Deluge*. Sin after the Deluge, e.g. that of the sons of Noah, 
is ascribed, as in parts of the Look of Enoch, to the instigation 
of the demons (the offspring of the watchers); but the 
passages‘ in which this is the case are probably interpolations 
from a lost apocalypse of Noah*®. It will be obvious that the 
incident of the watchers is not assigned the same importance 
in the world’s history which it bears in the groundwork of 
Enoch; it is used, as in Genesis, to explain the corruption 
which immediately preceded the Deluge, a corruption which, 
it is expressly stated, was- afterwards wholly done away®; 
it is not employed to describe the original entrance of sin 
amongst mankind. 

For that purpose the writer rather uses the alternative 
biblical narrative of the sin in Paradise; and on this account 
his work is of the greater interest here. 

The account which the Look of ¥ubzlees gives of the life of 
the first pair in Eden contains a few peculiar details. We 
are told, for instance, that Adam and Eve lived in the 
garden seven years before their transgression’. The account 
of the temptation and sin, given in c. iii., closely follows that 
of Genesis; the tempter is called simply the serpent, and 
is not identified with Satan, although Satan is mentioned 
elsewhere in the book (xxiii. 9). Embellishment, however, 
appears again when it is stated® that, on the day on which 


ASV 2 va vel. 2 y. 2 ff. 

3 vii. 21 ff. This, however, is here said to have been only one out of three 
reasons for the punishment of the Flood. 

4 vii. 26—39; x. I—15. 

5 This seems certain at least in the case of the former passage mentioned. See 
Art. Noah, Book of, in Hastings’ Dict. of the Bible, 11. 556. 

ὅν, 12. ‘*And He made a new and righteous nature for all His creatures, 
that they should never sin any more in their whole nature, and should be 


righteous.” 
Petit be 8 iii. 28, 


vil] 72 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 193 


Adam was expelled from the garden of Eden, “the mouths 
of all beasts and cattle and birds and things which walk and 
move ceased to speak; for they all talked, one with another, 
one tongue and one language.” The animals also were 
turned out of Eden along with Adam! It may be noticed 
that elsewhere in this book? the Fall is said to have involved 
the loss of man’s power to speak “the language which was 
revealed,” ze. the Hebrew tongue. The former of these 
passages is interesting as embodying the belief that the Fall 
affected the lower animals and the course of nature*. This 
idea is not further developed, however, and nothing’ is said 
of any moral consequences resulting from Adam’s sin to his 
posterity. The writer of the book either did not attach much 
weight to the teaching which represented the first sin as 
fraught with lasting and universal consequences for mankind, 
or else he is another witness to the truth of the view that a 
doctrine of original sin did not arise in Judaism until very 
near the dawn of the Christian era. 


IV. The Apocalypse of Abraham. 


This writing‘, originally purely Jewish, contains a curious 
description of the Fall. Its author seems to have been some- 
what concerned with the problem of evil and theodicy®; and 
it is to be observed that though his demonology has some 
resemblance to that of the Enoch-literature®, he diverges from 
some of the older apocalyptic writers in making the Fall his 
starting point for the history of the race. The tempter is 


Ὁ 11: 20. aXx11. 25. 20. 

3 See also Chap. x. (below). 

The idea that all the animals originally possessed the power of speech was 
held by Josephus (Az/z. 1. i. 4, “ But as all living creatures had one language at 
that time...’’) and by Philo, De Coz/fus. Ling. 3, Quaest. et sol. in Gen. 1. 32. 

+ A German translation, by Prof. Bonwetsch, exists in Studien zur Geschichte 
der Theologie u. Kirche, 1897. The date of the apocalypse cannot be accurately 
fixed. 

> See e.g. the end of the passage, c. xxiil., quoted below. 

6 Bonwetsch (of. εἶΖ., S. 66) believes the passage in c. xiv. relating to Azazel, 
who here, as in the (Aethiopic) Book of Enoch, plays the part of chief tempter of 
mankind, to be based partly on Isai. xiv. 13 ff. and on Exoch xcvi. Azazel is 
represented as banished from heaven, and as having taught the secrets of heaven. 
From him proceeds all evil. He corresponds here exactly to Satan. 


ὯΝ 13 


104 The Fall and Original 512 [CHAP. 


Azazel, who appeared “like a serpent in form, but having 
hands and feet like a man, and wings at his shoulders.” He 
is not said to have had any relations with Eve such as certain 
other Jewish writings describe'; but it is noteworthy that the 
Fall, as here depicted, appears to be closely associated or 
identified with fleshly union’. 


V. Pseudo-Philo. 


Cohn* regards this work as a specimen of historical 
haggada which was adopted soon after its composition 
(2.6. after 70 A.D.) in the Christian Church. It may be men- 
tioned here as containing an allusion to the Fall, in which it 
closely follows the biblical narrative. Adam is led to trans- 
egress through Eve, who in turn is tempted by the serpent ; 
and thus “constituta est mors in generationes hominum.” 
The Fall is regarded as the cause of death, but is not con- 
nected with human sinfulness. | 


1 See above, p. 189, n. 3, and pp. 156 ff. 

2 Cf. below, p. 197, n. I. 

The chapter in which the scene of the Fall is described (xxiii.) may be repro- 
duced here: 

‘*And I saw there (in Eden) a man, tall in stature and fearful in breadth, 
incomparable in appearance, in embrace with a woman, who also resembled the 
man in appearance and size. And they were standing under one tree of Eden, 
and the fruit of this tree looked like a cluster of the vine; and behind the tree 
was standing one like a serpent in form, but having hands and feet like a man, 
and wings at his shoulders, six on his right and six on his left; and they held the 
cluster of the tree in their hands, and they whom I saw embracing lay with one 
another. And I said: ‘Who are these embracing one another, or who is the 
being betwixt them, or what is this fruit which they are eating, O Mighty, 
Eternal One?’ And he said: ‘This is the counsel of man, this is Adam, and 
these are their desires on earth, this is Eve, but he who is between them is the 
godless power (Gott/osigkeit) of their enterprise in ruin, Azazel himself.’ And 
I said: ‘Eternal, Mighty One! Why hast thou granted him such power to ruin 
the human race in its (his?) works on the earth?’ And he said to me: ‘Listen, 
Abraham ; those that do evil, and so many as I hated among them that practise 
it, over them gave I him power and to be loved of them.’ And I answered and 
said: ‘O Eternal, Mighty One! Why hast thou willed to cause that evil is desired 
in the hearts of men, since thou art angry at that which has been willed by thee, 
with him who deals frowardly with thy decree?’” 

3 Jew. Quart. Rev. 18098. 

The Latin @text of what proved to be portions of this work was edited by 
Dr James in Zexts and Studtes, vol. 11. 


vil] 2722 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 195 


The Assumption of Moses, probably written early in the first century 
A.D. by a Pharisee, yields no material, in its present form, that is relevant 
to our subject. It is said that the latter portion of it, which has been lost, 
probably dealt with the origin of sin. Indeed Origen, De Princip. Il. ii. 1, 
asserts that in this book, as he knew it, the archangel Michael says that 
the serpent, being inspired by the devil, was the cause of Adam and 
Eve’s transgression. On account of this interpretation of a fragment 
of the Fall-story the writing just deserves mention here. 

The Psalms of Solomon are also of no service for our purpose. They 
contain indeed a passage (ix. 7) in which man’s freedom and responsibility 
are very strongly insisted upon ; but the text at this place is uncertain, 
and it is a mistake to suppose that the most one-sided insistence on 
man’s self-determination was inconsistent, in a Pharisee, with the possi- 
bility of belief in such a doctrine of the Fall as some Jews at least of that 
day possessed. The passage in question cannot therefore be pressed into 
a sign of the writer’s negative attitude towards a view approaching that 
contained in the doctrine of Original Sin. 

The Zestament of Abraham, believed by Kohler (/ew. Quart. Rev. VI. 
p- 581) to be a pre-Christian Jewish writing, has something to say of the 
angel of death, but does not speak of his having any connexion with the 
fall of man. Death is regarded as universal, but is not here traced to 
Adam. Kohler believes this angel of death to be the same as Samael, 
and to have been associated only with physical evil, thus opposing 
Dr James’ view (Zexts and Studies, 11. p. 58), who would identify him 
with Satan, the introducer of moral evil also. Torrey (Jew. Eucyclo- 
paedia, Art. Apocalyptic Literature) also contends for the purely Jewish 
origin of this writing, and emphasises the absence in it of any reference 
to Adam’s fall in passages where there was ample occasion for its 
mention. The souls of men are pictured as passing by Adam, seated 
on a throne, through the wide and the narrow gate, each by his own 
merit or fault, but none encumbered by Adam’s sin. 


VI. The Books of Adam. 


The pseudepigraphic literature which is associated with 
the name of Adam may be examined here because, though 
part of it is undoubtedly of Christian authorship, it is highly 
probable that two of its most important fragments, at least, 
have a common Jewish source of pre-Christian date’. These 


1 See Kautzsch’s Psendepigraphen des A. T.,S. 510. This view, it should be 
mentioned, is dissented from by Dillmann, Schiirer and others. See also Hort, in 
Smith’s Dict. of Christ. Biography. An Adam-book, however, seems to be alluded 
to by a Jew at the end of the 2nd century; see A/onatschrift fiir Geschichte τι. 


I13—2 


τού The Fall and Original Sin [ΟΠᾺΡ. 


two writings are (i) that unhappily named by Tischendorf 
The Apocalypse of Moses, and otherwise called Zhe Story of 
the Conversation of Adam, or simply The Book of Adam; 
-(ii) The Life of Adam and Eve, edited by Meyer (in the 
Abhandlungen αἰ. Kénigl. Bayerisch. Akademie, philos.-phitol. 
Klasse, 1876), which is dependent upon the former work, 
though regarded by its first editor and others as exhibiting 
no trace of Christian influence. 


(a) The Apocalypse of Moses’. 


The Apocalypse of Moses contains an account of the Fall, 
put into the mouth of Eve, which is on the whole true to the 
biblical narrative, though expanded in the usual style of 
haggada. The tempter is Satan, and his motive in bringing 
about the ruin of Adam and Eve is envy. The ‘adversary’ 
used the serpent, in whom he saw the wisest of the animats, 
as his vessel or instrument ; but in the account of the tempta- 
tion this seems momentarily to be forgotten, and Eve is 
accosted by Satan in the form of an angel. Two traditions 
are probably here confused and blended into one; for it has 
already been seen that the tempter of Eve was sometimes 
said to be a fallen angel, sometimes a speaking serpent, and 
sometimes a serpent indwelt by Satan*. The temptation 


Wissenschaft des Judenthums, XL. 5. 63. Torrey, loc. ctt., states that Zunz’s 
assertion that the Talmud knows of an Adam-book is erroneous, but regards it as 
certain that behind the Adam-literature now existing there lay an ancient Jew7sh 
collection of legends; so also Kabisch, £schatologte des Paulus, S. 156. 

1 For Greek Text see Tischendorf, Afocalypses Apocryphae (an eclectic text). 
An E. Tr. will be found in Azte-Micene Library, vol. xv1. The E. Tr. by F. Ὁ. 
Conybeare of an Armenian Version, of higher value than the Greek fragments, is 
published in Jew. Quart. Rev. vil. Cf. the translation of Issaverdens, from the 
Armen. MSS. of S. Lazarus, in Uncanonical Writings of the Old Testament, 1901. 
A German rendering of the Adam-books, and an introduction to them, δι Fuchs, 
Ww ἯΙ be found in Kautzsch, of. cet. 

2 The following is the (abridged) translation of Conybeare: 

‘“The which Satan beheld (to wit) our glory and honour; and having found 
the serpent, the wisest animal of all which are on the whole earth, he approached 
him and said unto him” (so far in Armen. only: the Gk. differs): “1 desire to 
reveal unto thee the thought which is in my heart and to unite (with) thee. Thou 
seest how much worth God has bestowed on man. But we have been dishonoured ; 
let us go and drive him out of the garden, out of which we have been driven 
because of him. Do thou only become a vessel (tool) unto me, and I will deceive 


vil] 22 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 107 


itself is associated, as elsewhere in simiiar writings, with 
sexual passion’. ‘Thus, in the Greek, Satan or the serpent, 
after pledging Eve to give the fruit to her husband as well as 
to eat it herself, is said to climb the tree and to put upon the 
fruit “the poison of his wickedness, that is, of his lust (τῆς 
ἐπιθυμίας avtov) ; for lust is the head (one MS. has ‘root and 
origin’) of all sin%” In c..xxv. Eve is told she is to pray: 
“O Lord save me in this present, and henceforth I will not 
turn me to the same szzning in my flesh.” 

A few other details of the account are of interest. The 
serpent, besides receiving the punishment mentioned in 
Genesis, is deprived of hands and feet, ears, wings and other 
members’, because it had allowed itself to “ become the vessel 
of shame.” The Fall, moreover, affects Nature generally. 
One consequence was that, when Eve sinned, all the leaves 
fell off the trees of the garden, except those of the fig-tree 
only*, The animals, too, lost their fear and reverence for 
man. The beast which attacked Seth thus addresses Eve: 
“For when thy mouth was opened to eat of the fruit of the 
tree, of which God commanded you not to eat of the same, 
and thou didst eat and transgress the commandment of God, 
then our nature changed into disobedience to men®”’ Simi- 
larly, in the curse on Adam‘, the Greek text adds, as a gloss, 
them by thy mouth in order to ensnare them. And instantly the serpent hung 
himself from and lay along the wall of the garden. Then Satan, having taken 
the form of an angel, sang the songs of praise. And I looked and saw him on 
the wall in the form of an angel.” 

The confusion between Satan as serpent and Satan as angel occurs in all 
the MSS. There is agreement also as to the cause of Satan’s envy; it is the 
glory and the honour that God had prepared for? Adam and Eve, coupled, 
according to some of the versions, with the remembrance that himself and the 
animals had been expelled from the garden because of Adam. This last feature 
is a peculiar embellishment. 

1 Cp. 4 Macc., Apocal. of Abraham, Slavonic Book of Enoch. For talmudic 
parallels see Chap. vil., and Weber, για. Theologie, 1897, S. 219. OnS. Paul’s 
probable use of this idea, see Thackeray, The Relation of S. Paul to Contemp. 
Jew. Thought, p. 50 ff. a 

2 Conybeare’s tr. from the Armenian runs thus: ‘‘he...drew nigh unto the 
tree, and took and gave to me of the fruit forthwith; the offspring of his 
wickedness, that is to say, of desire.” Issaverdens has ‘fhe gave to me the 
production of his wickedness, which is lust.” This passage occurs In 6. ΧΙΧ. 

τ Ἔχω © Tee 

Jas ae 6 c. xxiv. 


198 The Fall and Original 51: |CHAP. 


“and those beasts which thou ruledst shall rise up against thee 
and rebel, because thou hast not kept my commandment.” 
The darkening of the sun and moon (c. xxxvi.) is not at- 
tributed to the Fall, but these heavenly bodies are repre- 
sented as interceding for Adam’ 

The important question, however, for our purpose, is as 
to what is the doctrine of this writing concerning the conse- 
quences of the first sin for the race: whether or not we find 
here a doctrine of Original Sin. 

As regards the entail of death the answer is plain. In 
c. x. Eve is said to have wept bitterly and cried: “ Woe to 
me, Woe to me, Woe to me! For if it be unto me to come 
unto the day of resurrection, all sinners of my progeny will 
come to curse me, and will say: Cursed be Eva, for she has 
not kept safe the observance of the Lord her God, and because 
of this we shall all die with death’. A \ittle later (c. xiv.), 
Adam, when overtaken with his last sickness, says to Eve: 
“QO Eva, what hast thou done unto me, because thou hast 
brought upon me wrath exceeding, which also shall be in- 
herited by all the race of my offspring®” Perhaps ‘wrath’ 
here means only death, as the Greek text reads. It can 
scarcely be doubted, if the Greek codices are to be trusted, 
that this apocalypse regards Eve as the cause of her pos- 
terity’s sinfulness of nature. The passage on which this 
assertion is based (c. xxxil.) runs thus in the Armenian?: 
“For sin and transgressions have from me originated in the 
world”; and these words do not necessarily imply more than 
those of Ben Sira long before: “from a woman was the 
beginning of sins.” “But the Greek has: πᾶσα ἁμαρτία δι 
ἐμοῦ γέγονεν ἐν τῇ κτίσε. These words do not define how the 
sinfulness derived from Eve was transmitted to her descend- 
ants, but δι ἐμοῦ distinctly implies that she was regarded as 


1 The passage however seems to be connected with the tradition embodied in 
the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, c. ix. 

* The words italicised occur only in the Armenian. 

3 So the Armenian; the Greek has, in place of the last sentence, ‘‘ which is 
death, dominating all our race.” 

+ The Armenian text of S. Lazarus, translated by Issaverdens, has: ‘‘I am the 
origin of all sin and iniquity in this world.” 


π΄ 


vil] 2722 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 199 


its cause. Of course one cannot feel quite certain that the 
exact shade of meaning of the original apocalypse has been 
preserved. It is obvious, however, that we have an instance 
here of that aspect of tradition which emphasises the origin 
of sin in woman (cf. B. Sira). Eve is held much more re- 
sponsible than Adam, a point which is emphasised by 
S. Paul when, and only when, it suits his purpose. 


(0) The Life of Adam. 


This writing seems to have been derived from the same 
Jewish source as the Look of Adam, and has much in common 
with it. 

The envy of the devil, only partially explained in the last 
apocalypse, is here fully accounted for. Satan narrates to 
Eve, when telling her the reason for his continued harassing 
of herself and her husband after their fall, how it was through 
Adam that he had been cast out of heaven. For when God 
created Adam, He called upon the angels to adore him 
as His image. Michael obeyed, and summoned the other 
angels to do the same. Satan, however, refused; and on 
being threatened with the wrath of God, said that he would 
“exalt his throne above the stars of heaven'.” He was there- 
fore banished with his angels to earth, where he began to envy 
man his happiness in Paradise’. 

The first and shorter account of the Fall given in the 
Apocalypse of Moses is reproduced in the Life of Adam, but 
no important variations occur. It may therefore here be passed 
over. The second and more interesting history of the event 
is omitted altogether. There is no additional light thrown, 
therefore, on the attitude of the early Adam-legends towards 
the question of inherited sinfulness. 

Both these Adam-books emphasise the first ‘glory’ of 
unfallen man. 


| The later Adam-books, though much less useful for the 
purpose of arriving at Jewish and pre-Christian teaching as 


1 Part of this story is a haggadic midrash on Isai. xiv. 13. Other versions 
of it occur. 


2 cc. xli—xvil. 


200 The Fall and Original 51: |CHAP. 


to the Fall, may be briefly noticed at this point. They will 
serve at least to show the development of some of the ideas 
contained in the two writings last discussed. 


(c) The Book of Adam and Eve (Malan), or The Conftict 
of Adam and £ve (Dillmann). 


This work may be as old as the fifth or sixth century. 
It is thoroughly Christian but makes use of old Jewish legend 
and haggada, and is possibly based on a Jewish original. 
It does not describe the Fall fully, but contains many allusions 
to it, and especially to its consequences. 

Adam, before his transgression, is described as a ‘bright 
angel!’; he and Eve ‘were filled with the grace of a bright 
nature’, and had not hearts turned towards earthly things ; 
they were able to behold the angels in heaven’, and glory 
rested upon them‘, All this was lost by the Fall. 

The tempter is generally Satan®, ‘who continued not in 
his first estate, nor kept his faith’; elsewhere he is Satan 
‘hidden in the serpent®’; but in one passage, according to 
Malan’s translation, he is uniquely described as ‘the serpent 
that became Satan’. The serpent is said to have been the 
most exalted of all beasts originally, and the most beautiful’. 


(dq) The Treasure Cave. 


This book has close affinities with the last, and in common 
with it speaks of the beauty and glory of Adam before the 
Fall, adding that he was worshipped, when first created, by 
the angels. The fall of Satan from heaven is described very 
much as in the Koran; being by nature ‘fire and spirit’ 
Satan refused, when called upon, to bow down to ‘dust,’ and 
on that account was expelled to earth. There he envied the 


Lie 10: 

2 i. 2, 8, 13, etc.; and see Malan’s notes, p. 210. 

3 i.4and8. This is said to be a case of borrowing from Slav. Enoch; but 
the tradition was probably wide-spread. 

τὸ ἐρέτας ἀρ Oy ΤΠ Ὁ 

Pi. 27. USENET 

SUNT, 


vul| 22 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 201 


happy life of Adam and Eve in Paradise, and ‘entered into 
the serpent’ in order to tempt them to sin1. 


(e) The Apocalypse of Adam, or The Testament 
of Adam and Eve. 


According to Renan, the editor of this pseudepigraph?, we 
have in it a writing’of Gnostic origin. It contains but one 
or two references to the Fall. Inc. iii. we read: “ Because 
thou hast given ear to the serpent, thou and thy children 
after thee shall be the serpent’s food.” Further on, Adam, 
speaking to Seth of the coming deluge, says: “for in con- 
sequence of the sin of thy mother Eve they have been made 
sinners.” These words have certainly a Pauline ring. 


(f) Hustory of the Creation and of the Transgression of Adam’. 


This writing contains an account of Satan’s banishment 
from heaven corresponding to the story referred to above, in 
the Life of Adam, in some points; but Satan here refuses to 
worship God, not His creature man, who in fact was made 
after Satan’s fall, and on account of his pride*. Then Satan, 
growing envious of man, entered into the serpent, who at first 
was winged and had a tongue®. The serpent was thus used 
as an instrument for the deception of Eve. He tells her that 
God himself had not reached the glory of Divinity before He 
ate of the fruit now offered to Eve—a new embellishment. 
Eve, on partaking of the fruit, was ‘bereft of her splendour.” 
A very romantic turn is given in this curious version of the 
Fall-story to the manner in which Adam yielded to his wife's 
persuasion. “ Better were it for me to die than to be separated 
and parted from my wife,” he exclaimed. After examining 
the fruit for the space of three hours, his conjugal affection 
conquered his fear: “I cannot live without my wife!” 

1 See Bezold’s German translation, Ss. 3—7. 

2 Journal Asiat. Ser. V. Tome ii. pp. 427 ff. 

3 This is from MS. No. 729 of the Armenian Library of S. Lazarus, Venice ; 
an E.T. will be found in Issaverdens’ Uncanonical Writings of the Old Testament 
(Venice, 1901), p. 39. 

1 Issaverdens, of. czt., ἢ. 40. 

5 Cf. the accounts in Afocalypse of Abraham and Afocalypse of Moses, above. 


502 The Fall and Original Sin  |CHAP. 


g) Fragments of Adam-literature. 


The History of the Expulsion of Adam from the Garden, 
contained in the same collection in which the last writing 
occurs}, states that Satan made a compact with Adam, binding 
the first father and his posterity to serve him if shown “the 
light.” This is a unique theory of Original Sin, and has a very 
modern sound. 

The narrative, taken also from the same collection, en- 
titled Concerning the good tidings of Seth’, may be mentioned 
for its version of the story of the angels (Gen vi. 1—4), here 
interpreted of the relations of the Cainites and Sethites. 
Cain’s descendants were chiefly women, who painted them- 
selves in order to entice the few men, and so deceive the 
children of Seth, who were men, living piously and not 
mixing with Cain’s descendants. The point most worthy of 
notice here is that, in spite of its totally different application 
of the biblical narrative from that met with in the Exoch- 
literature and the Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs, this 
story embodies a variation of the more usual tradition which 
has already been found to occur elsewhere: the variation, 
namely, according to which the women were the seducers of 
the sons of God. 

The Hustory of the Repentance of Adam and Eve?, enu- 
merates the punishments of Adam. Among them are de- 
privation of ‘light, and of grace, estrangement from God, and 
equality with the beasts, which were before obedient to and 
subordinate to man. 


VII. Zhe Greek Apocalypse of Baruch (3rd Apoc. of Baruch 
of Dr James). 


This writing, according to Ryssel+, probably has a Jewish 
foundation, though it has been adapted and interpolated by a 
Christian of the second century. 

Part at least of the passage in c. iv. which speaks of the 

1 op. cit., p. 49. 47 0 Ti, 
0p. Cif, Ὁ 7G; 
4 In Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen, S. 402. 


vu] 222 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 203 


tree which caused the fall of Adam is a Christian interpola- 
tion. The tree is there identified with the vine’, and is said 
to have been planted by Samael. 

Samael, moreover, figures as the tempter in Eden, and is 
said to have “put on the vesture of the serpent®.” In the 
Slavonic text of the same chapter, according to which the 
serpent was the tempter, we find another allusion to the belief 
that the Fall was attended with consequences to the world of 
Nature. The following is a rendering of Ryssel’s German 
translation: “ When the serpent tempted Adam and Eve, and 
showed them their nakedness, and they wept bitterly over 
their nakedness, then wept also all creation, the heaven and 
the sun and the stars, and creation was stirred even to the 
throne of God; the angels and the powers were moved for 
the transgression of Adam, but the moon laughed. Therefore 
God was angry with it and darkeried its light*....” 


1 Dr James in Zexts and Studies, vol. Vv. 
* Cf. Apoc. of Abraham, above, p. 194, n. 2. Ὁ (eee 
4 Cf. Apoc. Mosts, xxxvi. 


Ole BAM aR aK IDS. 


THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN IN JEWISH PSEUDEPI- 
GRAPHICAL LITERATURE—(continued). 


VIII. Zhe Book of the Secrets of Enoch (The Slavonic 
Book of Enoch). 


THIS pseudepigraph has already engaged our attention in 
a previous chapter. There, however, it was only the dis- 
tinctively Alexandrian tendencies of the book with which 
we were concerned. It remains for us to examine more 
fully its treatment of the Fall and the problem of human 
sinfulness. 

The value of the testimony of this book to the nature of 
pre-Christian doctrine on the Fall is impaired by the sus- 
picion which suggests itself, that one of the two recensions 
of it may perhaps have been expanded with Christian inter- 
polations. Dr Charles, who, in conjunction with Mr Morfill, 
was the first to edit the book}, regards the work as practically 
homogeneous, and as composed in the first half of the first 
century A.D. Certain of the arguments for this date seem to 
be a little precarious ; and the possibility that some of the 
resemblances in diction to the New Testament may be due 
to dependence of the apocalypse on the Scriptures rather than 
vice versa, at least in the case of the longer version A, has not 
perhaps been sufficiently considered. Dr Charles admits that 


1 The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, translated and edited by Morfill and 
Charles, 1896. 


CH.IX] /ewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 205 


the text A is very corrupt and contains interpolations, but 
takes it for a truer representative of the original than B, 
which he considers to be a short résumé of A. The two 
versions are certainly not independent writings; but it may 
well be that, even supposing B to be a condensation of the 
original Greek text, A is an expansion of it, and is inter- 
polated by a Christian or by a Jew influenced by contact with 
Christianity. This suspicion is increased when, instead of 
reading Charles’ text, which consists of A corrected by B and 
other manuscripts, and is therefore eclectic, we study the 
versions A and B separately, as they have been published, for 
instance, in the German translation by Bonwetsch!. We then 
find that most (not quite all) of the resemblances to New 
Testament language are confined to A; we find that in B 
Adam is scarcely so much as mentioned, whereas in A much 
is said of him, and he is made responsible for universal 
human sinfulness in a more thorough sense than is to be met 
with in any other purely Jewish writing. Egyptian local 
colouring, however, is evident in both A and B. It is true 
that other writers go even further than Prof. Charles in 
asserting the homogeneity and purely Jewish authorship of 
this book’. 

Without claiming to establish the opposite conclusion, we 
may here venture to be so far sceptical of that which has 
hitherto been generally adopted, as to consider the question 
not yet closed, and meanwhile to follow Bonwetsch’s example, 
and examine the contents of the A and B versions separately, 
on the possibility that some of the peculiarities of the A 
manuscript may receive explanation in the future on the 
supposition of Christian interpolation. 

Taking then the A version first, we observe in it some 
reference to an account of the descent of the angels re- 
sembling that contained in the Noachian interpolations of the 
(Aethiopic) Book of Enoch, and differing from the story given 


1 Abhandlungen der Konigl. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaft zu Gottingen ; 
philos.-philol. Klasse, Neue Folge, 1. 

2 Torrey, in Jew. Encyclopaedia, Art. Apocalyptic Literature, states that there are 
no Christian additions and interpolations; Loisy, in Revue a’histoire et de littérature 
velig. 1. p. 32 ff., denies that there is any trace of Christian influence. 


206 The. Fall and Original 51: |CHAP. 


in the groundwork of that writing. The watchers, that is to 
say, are identified with the satans as a class. The corruption 
of the world, in the period preceding the Deluge, is here again 
ascribed to them. 

“The men took and brought me up into the fifth heaven, 
and I saw there many hosts not to be counted, called 
Grigori; and their appearance was like men, and their size 
was greater than that of giants....... And they (ze. the men) 
said to me: ‘These are the Grigori, who, with their prince 
Satanail, rejected the holy Lord. And in consequence of 
these things they are kept in great darkness in the second 
heaven; and of them there went three to the earth from the 
throne of God to the place Ermon; and they entered into 
dealings on the side of Mount Iermon, and they saw the 
daughters of men, that they were fair, and took unto them- 
selves wives. And they made the earth foul with their deeds. 
[.Sok. adds: and the wives of men continue to do evil.]|| And 
they acted lawlessly in all times of this age, and wrought 
confusion, and the giants were born, and the strangely tall 
men, and there was much wickedness. And on account of 
this God judged them with a mighty judgment?’” 

It will be observed that this legend of the descent of the 
watchers is not used here, as it would seem to be in the Book 
of Enoch, as a Starting-point for the history of universal 
sinfulness. It is referred to incidentally, and the real be- 
ginning of human sin is elsewhere traced, as we shall see, to 
Adam and Eve. 

Satanail is not said, in the passage quoted above, to 
have been leader of the lustful watchers who came down to 
Hermon. He had previously rebelled against God, with the 
rank below him, entertaining “the impossible idea, that he 
should make his throne higher than the clouds over the earth, 
and should be equal in rank to [God’s] power.” And so he 
was hurled from the heights with his angels?» His name was 
changed to Satan after he left the heavens*, He now “took 
thought, as if wishing to make another world, because things 


1 xviii. 1 ff. See Charles’ note zx loc. 
2 xxix. 4, 5; cf. Vita Adae, above, p. 199. 
bg $a bey & 


ΙΧ] 72 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 207 


were subservient to Adam on earth, to rule it and have lord- 
ship over it.” Moreover “he understood the judgment upon 
him, and the former sin which he had sinned. And on 
account of this, he conceived designs against Adam.” 

The A version of this apocalypse has interesting informa- 
tion as to the unfallen state of Adam and Eve. The tendency 
to exalt Adam to a position superior in privileges to that of 
other men, with its humble beginning in Ecclus. xlix. £6, is 
here almost full-grown. His creation is described in terms 
which recall the teaching of the Stoics and of Philo?» He was 
placed upon the earth “like an angel, in an honourable, great, 
and glorious way*.” Here follow the words of the Almighty: 
“ And I made hima ruler to rule upon the earth, and to have 
My wisdom. And there was no one like him upon the earth 
of all My creations. And I gave him a name from the four 
substances: the East, the West, the North, and the South. 
And I appointed for him four special stars, and I gave him 
the name Adam. And I gave him his will, and I showed him 
the two ways, the light and the darkness. And I said unto 
him: ‘This is good and this is evil’; that I should know 
whether he has love for Me or hate: that he should appear 
in his race as loving Me. I knew his nature, he did not 
know his nature. Therefore his ignorance is a woe to him 
that he should sin, and I appointed death on account of 
his sin*.” 

1 xxxi. 3, 5,6. We have here more than one reason assigned for the ‘envy’ 
of the devil, of which so many pseudepigraphic writings speak. 

Pekka s 1. δὲ Gharies, note, 6S ay 

4 The part of this passage which involves the idea that ignorance is in itself 
evil, has already been noticed, p. 143. The passage is one of considerable interest 
and importance, containing, as it does, an allusion to the ‘two ways,’ and to the 
probation involved in man’s endowment with moral faculties, and perhaps at the 
same time referring to the dual nature of man with his two yezers. Man does not 
sin because of ignorance of right and wrong; he is endowed at the outset With this 
knowledge of the two ways, and with self-determining will. This line of thought 
came later to be fused with the conception of the tree of knowledge of good and 
evil, whence the traditional interpretation of that tree in Christian exegesis. 
Speculation on this subject, when it began, set out not from the original sense of 
Gen. ii—iii., which had long been lost and was not recoverable, but from the 
idea of God’s originally endowing man with moral knowledge, prior to his 


probation by, or participation of, the forbidden fruit, an idea which, perhaps 
ultimately traceable to such Old Test. passages as Jer. xxi. 8, Deut. xxx. 15, 19, 


208 The. Fall and Original Sin — [CHAP. 


The latter portion of the passage just cited has led us 
somewhat away from the topic of the first man’s primitive 
glory. In the following chapter we read that God “ made for | 
him the heavens open that he should perceive the angels 
singing the song of triumph. And there was light without 
any darkness continually in. Paradise’.” Finally, in xliv. 1, 
man’s creation by God’s own hands, and in His image, is 
strongly emphasised; and in viii. the beauties of Paradise, 
placed in the third heaven, are graphically described. 

The account of the temptation is of interest, brief as it is. 
Satan is said to have “entered and deceived Eve”; and it is 
added, “ But he did not touch Adam®” ‘This passage has been 
appealed to by Mr Thackeray as a possible illustration of the 
Jewish tradition according to which “the temptation of Eve 
by the serpent took the form of a temptation to unchastity.” 
The case for this conclusion, indeed, is much stronger than 
Mr Thackeray makes it. For the addition, after ‘entered,’ of 
‘into Paradise,” which words are introduced by the manu- 
script Sof. and adopted by the writer referred to, probably 
misrepresents the meaning of the original. Bonwetsch con- 
jecturally supplies “into the serpent,” which is equally on the 
wrong tack. The verb (wmzzde) is here active; but there is 
no need to supply any other noun than that which is in the 


whose meaning is echoed in Ecclus. xv. 17, is developed in such passages as the 
following: Ecclus. xvii. 6, Apoc. Baruch, xix., Ep. of Barnabas, xviii. τ, Didache, 
i. 1, Zest. Aser,i., St. Oracles, vill. 399, 400, and Clem. Hom. v. 7 ‘‘I said unto 
him this is good and this is evil.” It was reserved for later exegesis to interpret 
the tree of knowledge as the means by which such moral knowledge was made 
accessible to man, whether by eating of it or by the moral probation of abstaining 
from the temptation. Cf. Charles’ note, p. 42, some of whose references have 
been reproduced here. 

According to this passage, the first man sinned, not, of course, from lack of 
moral knowledge, but from ignorance of his own nature with its inclination to 
evil. Platonism is here superimposed on the (incipient?) Jewish notion of the 
two yezers, apparently. As was pointed out in Chap. vI., the writer forsakes Alex- 
andrian doctrine for the Palestinian teaching of his time in representing Adam’s 
sin as the cause of his death. It is emphasised, as in Ecclus. etc., that death 
came ‘‘by his wife” (xxx. 18). 

1 xxxi. 2. The account of Adam’s life on earth before his fall shows signs of 
being abridged, as verse 1 contains an obvious lacuna. 

In xxxii. 1 A adds: ‘‘ And Adam was five and a half hours in Paradise.” 

of ha They 


ΙΧ] 72 Jewish Pseudepigraplic Writings 209 


text, viz. Eve. The verb is frequently used, moreover, in the 
old Slavonic Bible in the sense of the biblical expression 
“come in unto,’ and therefore it is extremely probable that 
it has such a meaning here’. We have, in fact, in this passage, 
another example of the association of the Fall with the sin of 
unchastity, and an allusion to the tradition that Satan seduced 
Eve, in the narrower sense of that word. 

The words: “But he did not touch Adam,” thus receive 
a natural explanation, and imply, as Thackeray has pointed 
out, that immunity on the part of Adam from temptation by 
the serpent to which both Philo and S. Paul seem to allude, 
and which appears to have been “ἃ subject for discussion in 
the Jewish schools®.” 

The passage in this book which is by far the most 
important for our inquiry, is that which deals with the 
consequences of Adam's sin to his posterity. In c. xl. 1 ff, 
we read: “And I saw all our forefathers from the beginning 
with Adam and Eve, and I sighed and wept, and spake of 
the ruin (caused by) their wickedness: Woe is me for my 
infirmity and that of my forefathers. And I meditated in 
my heart and said: ‘Blessed is the man who was not born, 
or, having been born, has never sinned before the face of the 
Lord, so that he should not come into this place, to bear the 
yoke of this place*’” 


1 Mr Morfill has kindly supplied the author with these facts, in confirmation of 
his suspicion that the verb ‘ entered’ governed ‘ Eve.’ 

2 Thackeray, op. czt., pp. 50-57, where 2 Cor. xi. 2-3, 1 Tim. ii. 13-15 (and, 
incidentally, other Pauline expressions) are discussed in the light of the above 
passage and the parallels in Philo, Leg. Alleg. 111. 20, Quaest. et Sol. in Gen. 1. 33, 
Apoc. Mosts XIX. etc. 

3 Bonwetsch’s translation of this passage, which agrees exactly with that of 
Morfill, may be cited: ‘‘Und ich sah alle Urvater von Ewigkeit mit Adam und 
Eva, und ich seufzte und weinte und sprach iiber das Verderben ihrer Gottlosig- 
keit: wehe mir und meiner Ohnmacht und meiner Urvater! Und ich gedachte 
in meinem Herzen und sprach: Selig ist der Mensch, welcher nicht geboren ist, 
oder geboren nicht siindigt vor dem Angesicht des Herrn, damit er nicht komme 
an diesen Ort, noch bringe (trage) das Joch dieses Orts.” 

Owing to the kindness of Mr Morfill, the author is able to state that a scrutiny 
of the language of the original of this passage shows that the translation quoted 
above gives the only meaning which the passage could bear. The word rendered 
‘ruin’ may mean either physical or moral ruin; that rendered ‘infirmity’ is the 
equivalent of debilitas or ἀσθένεια. The text, elsewhere corrupt, here seems to be 


ΤΙ 14 


210 The Fall and Original Sin  [CHAP. 


This passage definitely implies the doctrine of inherited 
depravity and infirmity, contracted by Adam through his 
fall, and transmitted to his posterity. Its import seems to 
have escaped the attention of previous writers ; though, if the 
whole of the longer recension (4) of the book be as old as the 
shorter (8), and the date generally assigned to the book as 
a whole, ze. the first half of the first century A.D., be correct, 
we have here the earliest occurrence of the idea of inborn 
infirmity inherited from Adam, and a Jewish doctrine of 
Original Sin more explicit, and earlier, than the teaching of 
S. Paul upon the subject. This inference itself makes one, 
at first, slightly suspicious as to its premisses. Not that such 
a doctrine of inherited taint was impossible to the pre- 


- Christian Jewish mind: we have already seen how Jewish 


speculation had supplied all the ingredients of such a theory, 
and how very nearly it sornetimes came to gathering them 
together in a generalisation identical with that which we 
especially associate with the name of S. Augustine. More- 


-over we shall presently see that the writer of 4 Ezra taught 


an essentially similar doctrine, and it cannot be proved that 
his teaching was shaped by contact with readers of S. Paul. 
Further, it may perhaps be maintained that the idea of 
original sin held by the authors of Zhe Secrets of Enoch 
and 4 Ezra had much more in common with the later doctrine 
of the Christian Church than had the indefinite teaching of 
the Apostle himself. There is therefore no reason for denying 
the possibility that the doctrine of Original Sin, in the sense 
of inherited bias to evil caused by the Fall, was ‘of the Jews.’ 
But the suspicion aroused by the uniqueness of the passage 
we have just considered is somewhat strengthened when we 
turn from the version of our book in which it is contained, 
and with whose contents we have so far been concerned, and 
look for parallel passages in the shorter version, δ. 

We then discover a complete difference between the two 
sources ; a difference indeed which it is much easier to observe 


clear. There appears to be no reason to suspect interpolation. The only question 
is whether the ‘ruin’ caused by the wickedness of Adam and Eve could possibly 
be their own death alone; but the sense of the first sentence surely renders such 
a supposition impossible. 


ΙΧ] 22 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 211 


than to explain. B&B has no allusion to the watchers as a 
source of corruption of mankind; and though the name of 
Adam is mentioned incidentally once or twice, nothing what- 
ever is said of his life in Paradise, of his temptation, his sin, 
or of the consequences of his fall. Such topics are rigorously 
excluded; and some sentences in A which are concerned with 
them are represented in B by words which refer to quite 
another circle of ideas. The question therefore inevitably 
arises, Whether the curious difference between #’s reticence 
and A’s fulness of information as to the first man and his 
fall is to be explained by postulating omission by & of much 
that was contained in the original Greek text, or addition to 
A of much that never found place in the original. The 
question is one for the expert in such critical problems, and 
therefore cannot be dealt with here. But in undertaking to 
expound the important statements of Zhe Secrets of Enoch 
with regard to the Fall and its consequences, it is desirable 
that the student’s attention be called to the existence of the 
literary problem connected with this book, a problem which 
one ventures to consider to be not yet finally and conclusively 
solved. 


The (Syriac) Apocalypse of Baruch. 


The remaining two Jewish apocalypses with which we 
have to deal, those of Baruch and Ezra, and the latter of 
these two books in a special degree, bring us into a rather 
different atmosphere than that of the writings dealt with in 
the preceding chapter. ‘They are more serious, less occupied 
with ancient legend, and much freer from the grotesque 
fancies and absurd puerilities which abound in the talmudic 
writings and in the apocryphal romances both of Jewish and 


1 With the important passage in 4, c. xl. τ quoted above, compare the parallel 
verses of B. ‘‘And when I had seen it, I sighed and wept over the ruin of the 
godless; and 1 said in my heart,” etc. much as in 4. These verses, in 4, are 
transposed into c. xlii., and follow a description of the guardians of the gates of 
Hades. The passage shows no signs of having been violently abridged any more 
than its parallel in 4 suggests subsequent interpolation. 

Other examples could easily be cited to show that either B deliberately avoids, 
or 4 deliberately foists in, passages dealing with the first man and the beginning 
of sin; the one or the other text tampering with the original. 


14—2 


212 The Fall and Original Stn  {CHAP. 


Christian religious literature. And they are somewhat im- 
portant for the student of Jewish speculation in the first 
century on the subject of the Fall and Original Sin. 

The Apocalypse of Baruch is of importance for several 
reasons. It is generally believed to have been written con- 
temporaneously with much of the New Testament’. It 
seems largely to represent the orthodox Judaism which 
S. Paul was concerned to controvert; and, as De Faye has 
said, it is the most rabbinical and accurately theological of all 
the pseudepigrapha. It has sometimes been considered to 
have grown out of opposition to the rising influence of 
Christianity, and to have been concerned, in particular, with 
combating the teaching as to the cause of human sinfulness 
which is developed in 4 Ezra, or that which is presented in 
the Epistles of S. Paul*. 

It is not necessary to -adopt here any of the several 
analyses of this apparently composite book into its different 
constituents proposed by various critics, nor to discuss sepa- 
rately the teaching of its several hypothetical strata. Even 
if more certainty attached to the results hitherto reached by 
criticism than can safely be assumed, the difference between 
the dates of these elements, and perhaps that between their 
teaching on the subject here concerned, is not so considerable 
as to make such a method advantageous. 

We may proceed, therefore, to classify the passages which 
are in any way connected with the development of the 
doctrine of the Fall. 

The legend of the watchers, which has been shown to 
occupy in some of the earlier pseudepigrapha the place of 
a history of the origin of human sin and corruption, here 


1 See Charles, Zhe Apocalypse of Baruch, Introd., for a full account of the 
literature on this book up to 1896, and Ryssel, in Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen, 
up to 1g00. Most of the recent critics of this work, except Clemen, argue for 
its composite nature, and regard portions of it as prior to the destruction of 
Jerusalem. ΄ 

* For fuller information see the works of Charles and Ryssel just referred to. 
As an example of the subjectivity of literary criticism it may be mentioned that 
some authorities have considered this apocalypse and 4 Ezra to have been written 
by the same author, and others have maintained that one of the two books was 
expressly written to controvert the other. 


ΙΧ] 222 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 213 


dwindles into insignificance in comparison with the story of 
the Fall. The watchers indeed are alluded to in one passage 
only. Adam is said to have been “a danger to his own soul: 
even to the angels was he a danger’.” In the following 
verses it is added: “ For moreover, at that time when he was 
created, they enjoyed liberty. And some of them descended, 
and mingled with women. And then those who did so were 
tormented in chains. But the rest of the multitude of the 
angels, of which there is no number, restrained themselves?” 
The old legend is evidently familiar to the writer of this 
portion of the apocalypse, but he nowhere uses it to account 
for man’s depravity, of which he is so deeply conscious. 

With regard to the unfallen state of the first man this 
apocalypse has little to say. But there is an interesting 
reference to the legend that, before his transgression, the 
heavens had been open to Adam’s vision’. The New Jerusa- 
lem is said to have been shown “to Adam before he sinned ; 
but when he transgressed the commandment, it was removed 
from him, as also Paradise.” Another passage, which will 
later have to be studied for its teaching as to the consequences 
of Adam’s sin, indirectly reflects light on its writer’s idea of 
Adam’s unfallen state in Paradise, and contains a curious 
fancy which was afterwards brought into prominence in 
patristic and scholastic literature. This passage which is 


Ὁ Ἵν Το. 

Ξ Dr Charles remarks on lvi. το: ““ἼΠ15. must mean that man’s physical 
nature was a danger to his spiritual; for it was the physical side of man that 
proved a danger to the angels whe fell through lust. Man’s physical nature was 
dangerous; for in it resided the ‘evil impulse.’’? This apocalypse does not 
mention the ‘‘evil impulse,” though its doctrine resembles that of rabbinical 
writings which have much to say of it. The statement that man ‘‘ was a danger 
to his own soul’ may be compared with the passage of S/av. Enoch quoted on 
p. 207; while the assertion of danger to the angels reminds us of that version 
of the story of the descent of the angels which regards the women as having 
attracted the ‘‘ sons of God’’; it also perhaps helps to understand 5. Paul’s reason 
why women should be covered—‘“ because of the angels,’’ 1 Cor. xi. Io. 

3 iv. 3. Cf. Slav. Enoch, xxxi. 2; Philo, Quaest. et Sol. in Gen. i. 32; Book 
of Adam and Eve (Malan), i. 8; FPestkta, 36b; Baba Bathra, 58a; Ephrem, 
i. 139 (referred to in Malan, p. 215); Clem. Homil. x. 4, xvii. 16. The idea is 
common to Alexandrian, pseudepigraphic and talmudic Jewish literature, along 
with Christian. It is the foundation of the doctrine that unfallen man possessed 
the direct vision of God. 


214 The Fall and Original Stn  |CHAP. 


quoted below, implies that before the Fall, not only did man 
know no grief or trouble, but no such thing as passion ; it 
was by the Fall that “the begetting of children was brought 
about, and the passion of parents produced}.” 

That the introduction of physical death as the universal 
lot of mankind was a consequence of the first transgression, is 
frequently asserted in the Apocalypse of Baruch, “Therefore 
the multitude of time that he (Adam) lived did not profit 
him, but brought death and cut off the years of those who 
were born from him?”: “Because when Adam sinned and 
death was decreed against those who should be born, then the 
number of those who should be born was numbered, and for 
that number a place was prepared where the living might 
dwell and the dead might be guarded*.” Other passages, 
attributed by Charles to a different writer, seem to this author 
to teach that man was originally mortal by nature, but that 
the Fall introduced premature or ‘untimely’ death’ Thus: 
“For though Adam first sinned and brought untimely death 
(s20rtem tmmaturam) upon all...°”; and “For owing to his 
(Adam’s) transgression untimely death came into being...®.” 

It remains to inquire whether the Afocalypse teaches any 
form of a doctrine of original sin, and, in particular, a doctrine 
of hereditary sinfulness; whether, that is, Adam’s trans- 
gression implanted an hereditary infection or infirmity in 


1 lvi. 6, ff. On the introduction of passion and generation by the Fall cf. 
Gregory of Nyssa, De Ofif. Hom. xvii., Augustine De Civ. Lib. xiv., Aquinas, 
Pars I. xcvill. 2, etc. 

ἘΣΎ 3; 

% xxiii. 4. These two passages belong to the (hypothetical) stratum which 
Charles calls 4%. They imply that Adam was conditionally immortal. Note that 
in xix. 8: ‘‘all the time from the day on which death was decreed against those 
who transgress,’’ it is not those who are to be born of Adam, as in the two 
preceding passages of the stratum in which this verse also occurs, but those 
‘‘who transgress,” who are to inherit death. Perhaps spiritual death is here 
rather in view: or we may have a compromise with the common view which 
attributes death to individual sin, notwithstanding Adam’s fall and its necessary 
consequences. 

4 Thackeray, of. ctt., p. 32n., suggests that ‘untimely,’ in such passages, 
is only a standing epithet for death, which seems likely enough. 

Bi livery xe 

6 lvi. 6. Quia enim cum transgressus est, mors, quae non erat tempore 
ejus, fuit.... 


1Χ] 7722. Jewish Pseudefhigraphic Writings 215 


human nature, thereby making mankind inevitably committed 
to actual sinfulness, or whether in some more forensic sense 
he constituted men ‘sinners,’ without necessarily corrupting 
their nature so as to weaken their will and power of self- 
determination, or to burden them with a bias toward evil or 
an abnormally strong evil impulse. 

It is curious that the writer of the Apocalypse of Baruch 
never describes the sinfulness of man in terms of the evil 
inclination, or evil heart, a conception which plays so large 
a part, not only in the rabbinical writings, but also in the 
doctrine of the author of 4 Ezra, as will soon be seen. -As 
Dr Porter remarks: “The principal difference between (these) 
two writers at this point is, that while Ezra, with a deep 
sense of sin, feels impelled to-go back to the grain of evil seed 
planted in Adam at the beginning, which explains though it 
does not really excuse sin, Baruch is satisfied to deal with 
sin as a fact and with its consequences in a more purely 
legal spirit?.” 

Another difference which will appear, when the statements 
of the apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra are compared, is that, 
whereas the writer of the latter of the two will be found to 
trace man’s propensity towards sin to the original endow- 
ment of (unfallen) Adam with the evil impulse, and does not 
assert this impulse to have been abnormally strengthened 
once and for all by Adam’s sin, Pseudo-Baruch, who insists 
more strongly upon man’s independence of Adam, nevertheless 
attributes certain derangements of human nature, disposing 
mankind towards sin, expressly to the Fall. Thus, in a 
passage which has already been mentioned, we read that 
when Adam transgressed, “grief was named and anguish 
prepared, and pain was created, and trouble perfected, and 
boasting began to be established, and Sheol to demand that 
it should be renewed in blood, and the begetting of children 
was brought about, and the passion of parents produced, and 
the greatness of humanity was humiliated, and goodness 
languished.” It is implied here that human nature suffered 
some derangement at the Fall. Before then man was passion- 


1 op. cit., pe 153- 2 Ivi. 6 ff. 


οτό The Fall and Original 572.  |CHAP. 


less as well as painless; teaching which it is difficult to 
reconcile with the current doctrine of the yezer. 

This mutilation or infection of human nature through 
Adam’s sin differs, of course, from that which was asserted 
later by the Christian Church. It refers only to one particular 
quality and does not imply that our nature as a whole was 
rendered “shattered and unsound.” Such other moral changes 
as are enumerated in the passage before us—the establish- 
ment of boasting and the languishing of goodness—are not 
necessarily to be regarded as consequences of an hereditary 
alteration in our nature; they simply “ began,’ and are such 
as might be propagated otherwise than by physical descent, 
which is not the case, of course, with parental passion. 

It is to be concluded then, so far, that the author of this 
apocalypse taught a partial disturbance of the constitution of 
our original nature, which he conceives as rather angelic than 
human, in consequence of Adam’s sin, This is a very 
different thing, however, from moral incapacity, infirmity 
or thorough corruption, such as other teachers have asserted 
to have been brought about by the Fall, and to which they 
trace all man’s actual sinfulness. We are not compelled 
by the passage we have been examining, in fact, to conclude 
that its writer held such a doctrine of the Fall as would see in 
that catastrophe the cause of all subsequent sin. Passages 
awaiting our consideration will make such an inference still 
less natural, if not impossible. 

There are several passages in which it is implied that the 
corruptness of humanity is due to the imitation of example, 
or, in technical words, is propagated through the ‘social 
heredity’ of environment rather than through the physical 
heredity of natural descent. Thus: “He that lighted has 
taken from the light, and there are but few that have imitated 
him. But those many whom he has lighted have taken from 
the darkness of Adam, and have not rejoiced in the light of 
the lamp.” This verse is opposed to the doctrine of inborn 


1 xviii. 1, 2. As Charles says, zz Joc., ‘‘the law and Adam are in this 
passage symbolical names for the opposing powers of light and darkness.” We 
agree also that ‘‘the writer does not teach the doctrine of original sin and inherited 
spiritual incapacities ’ in this passage, but see here a contrast, not an agreement, 
as Dr Charles asserts, with the teaching of Slav. Enoch (see above, p. 209 f.). 


ΙΧ] zz Jewish Pseudefigraphic Writings 217 


moral incapacity ; it implies that man is left to determine his 
own spiritual destiny. Much stronger assertions of man’s 
absolute and undiminished responsibility, however, are to be 
found, and the derivation of his guz/t from Adam is explicitly 
denied. “For though Adam first sinned and brought un- 
timely death upon all, yet of those who were born from him 
each one of them has prepared for his own soul torment to 
come, and again each of them has chosen for himself glories 
tORCOME......: Adam is therefore not the cause, save only 
of his own soul, but each one of us has been the Adam of 
his own 5011}. This is as stark a repudiation of what is 
commonly meant by original sin, ze. the heredity of moral 
incapacity caused by Adam, as could be expressed. The 
passage is an explicit assertion of man’s ability to fulfil the 
commandments of God, a capacity in no way prejudiced by 
the Fall; man’s sin consists exclusively ‘in the following of 
Adam.’ The words seem to ring with polemic and resentment 
against a contrary doctrine of which the writer is aware, and 
with which he has no sympathy”. 

There is one passage in the Apocalypse of Baruch, however, 
in which this prevailing attitude seems to be abandoned, and 
in which the critics of the book have generally found the 
doctrine that the fall of Adam involved his posterity in 
spiritual consequences in spite of themselves. In xlviii. 42, 
43 we read: “OQ Adam, what hast thou done to all those 
who are born from thee? And what will be said to the first 
Eve who hearkened to the serpent? For all this multitude 
are going to corruption, nor is there any numbering of those 
whom the fire devours®.” | 

On reading these verses one may perhaps feel tempted to 
dispose of the difficulties which they raise by regarding them, 


1 liv. 15, 19. That the human heart can be ‘‘pure from sins” is implied 
Mekal ¢ 

2 The relation of the teaching of this apocalypse to that of 4 Ezra on original 
sin is treated below in the discussion of the latter book, and again in Chap. x. 

3’ The rendering is that of Prof. Charles, whose Eng. translation has been 
followed in all the citations in this chapter. Ceriani’s Latin translation may also 
be given: ‘O quid fecisti Adam omnibus qui a te geniti sunt! Et quid dicetur 
Evae primae quae serpenti obaudivit ! Quia haec tota multitudo ivit ad tormentum, 
neque est numerus eis quos ignis devorat.”’ 


218 The Fall and Original Sin |CHAP. 


as Dr Charles is inclined to do, as an interpolation’. Their 
teaching, on any view of its precise import, certainly appears, 
at first sight, to be at variance with that which is so em- 
phatically asserted elsewhere in the book; and, if we adépt 
the theory of composite authorship, and assign the context 
in which they occur to a different writer than the author of 
chap. liv. they are not easily reconcilable even with the pre- 
suppositions and statements of the particular section in which 
they occur*. One desires, however, a more objective justifica- 
tion for so summary a course. In this case we can hardly fall 
back upon the reflection emphasised by Clemen, that dis- 
crepancies, even in a work of homogeneous authorship, are to 
be expected, because apocalyptic writers drew largely from 
divergent traditions*: for it is difficult not to see in the 
present apocalypse a deliberate polemic against one form of 
the doctrine of Original Sin; and, if this be so, the author or 
the general redactor can with difficulty be supposed to have 
allowed such inconsistency, whencesoever derived, to stand. 
On the other hand, it is hard to see why an interpolator should 
meddle only in this chapter, and not elsewhere, when the 
consequences of the Fall are under discussion. Further, we 
cannot safely fall back upon the undoubted fact that Jewish 
writers had not always thought out their doctrine on such 
subjects so clearly and deliberately as never to express them- 
selves without obvious inconsistency, but frequently stated 
antithetic aspects of.a problem without attempting, and 
apparently without being sensible of the need of effecting, 
a reconciliation between them. For, as has been said, in such 
a writing as this we are justified in expecting the avoidance 
of language which would seem to militate against a view 
which it so forcibly advocates and champions. We are 
brought here, therefore, to an zzpasse. Several ways out of 
the difficulty can be conceived; but which is the actual key 
to the problem cannot here be dogmatically decided. 

One point may be noticed. Though the passage in 
question deviates from the general tenour of the teaching 


ἘΠ Εἰ ee + 
e.g. its doctrine of works and merit. 
3 Theol. Studien und Kritiken, 1898. S. 211. 


ΙΧ] 72 Jewish Pseudefigraphic Writings 219 


of the apocalypse with regard to the consequences of Adam’s 
sin in implying that spiritual, as well as physical, death is to 
be traced to that cause, it nevertheless does not imply any 
‘doctrine of zzherited infirmity. The precise manner, in fact, 
in which such spiritual consequences are mediated to Adam’s 
posterity are not defined. There is no necessary implication of 
the idea that Adam was virtually the race, and that his sin was 
therefore potentially ours. If the language of a far later age 
may be used to interpret Pseudo-Baruch’s doctrine here, his 
teaching is rather to be associated with a theory of imputa- 
tion. The writer merely extends or amplifies the usual 
assertion that Adam and Eve involved their posterity in 
punishment. He would seem to mean that, on account of 
the transgression of its first parents, the race as a whole is 
(conditionally) subject to spiritual torment, just as it is subject 
to physical penalties, such as death, spoken of in other places ; 
and the vast majority of individuals, each of whom is else- 
where said to be wholly responsible for his own sins and 
sinfulness?, fail—it is not said in consequence of any inherited 
corruption of their nature—to work out their own salvation 
by performance of good works, and to procure their justifica- 
tion by devotion to the law. In other words, the writer may 
be understood to teach, in this passage, that all men are on 
Adam’s account ‘children of wrath,’ and inherit, or participate 
in, his punishment even beyond this life; this, and this only, 
so far as spiritual consequences are concerned, is what Adam 
“has done to all those who are born” from him, and herein 
consists the blame that will be attributed to Eve. That the 
overwhelming majority of mankind are going to spiritual 
perdition, is not said to be due to the fact that they have 
inherited an enfeebled nature, from whose influence there is 
no escape. The statement may even accord with the strong 
insistence in this book upon individual responsibility and its 
doctrine of the saving efficacy of good works: men can save 
themselves from this doom brought down on them by Adam 
if they will, by blamelessness of life; but they will not. Adam 


1 See e.g. verse 40, immediately preceding the passage under consideration : 
‘* Because each of the inhabitants of the earth knew when he was committing 
iniquity, and they have not known My law by reason of their pride.” 


220 The Fall and Original Sin [cuap. 


is thus conceived as having made us children of wrath only 
in the sense that we are on his account conditionally liable 
to future punishment?. 

If this interpretation of the passage xlviii. 42—43, and 
of the connexion of its teaching with other sides of the 
doctrine of the apocalypse be admissible, this work then 
presents no inconsistency with the general trend of rabbinic 
speculation on the consequences of the Fall, and is not really 
inconsistent with itself. It serves to illustrate what is the 
most usual Jewish standpoint with regard to the relation 
between mankind and Adam’. 

While in this one passage admitting a form of original 
sin—conditional liability to punishment for imputed sin—it 
argues, on the whole, for undiminished individual respon- 
sibility; and in no case does it sanction a doctrine of 
hereditary corruption of human nature, though in one par- 
ticular it approaches such a doctrine. 


4. Εαζα ΘΕ τ᾽ 


However the vexed question as to the relative dates of 
the apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra, or of their component 
parts, and as to the relations of these pseudepigrapha, the 
one to the other, may ultimately be decided, there can be 
little doubt that their attitudes towards the problems of 
human sinfulness and freedom of will are somewhat sharply 


1 That ‘‘wrath” was entailed, as well as death, on Adam’s posterity in 
consequence of the Fall, is taught in the passage quoted above, p. 198, from 
Apoc. Mosis, xiv., which resembles the present passage of Baruch so closely as to 
suggest dependence on one side or the other. Another parallel may be cited to 
show that the interpretation given above is not inconsistent with Jewish thought : 
‘Adam knew Eve only when he saw in spirit that after twenty-six generations 
the Israelites would accept the Law; for he had seen that his posterity would be 
condemned to Gehenna.” Beresch Rabba, c. 21. 

It may be remarked that the writer of the Art. Baruch, Apocalypse of, in the 
Jew. Encyclopaedia, gives a similar estimate of its teaching on Original Sin to that 
which has been suggested above. 

2 Ch XNUb est ΠΥ ΤῊ 1 τῇ Fetes 

Prof. Charles’s notes on this subject, and indeed the remarks of many writers, 
suffer somewhat from lack of necessary discrimination between possible forms of 
a doctrine of Original Sin, such as those of imputed sin accompanied by arbitrary 
punishment, and of inherited infirmity or corruption, 


ΙΧ] 72 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 221 


opposed. One cannot indeed infer, from a study of the 
several passages in these books which deal with such subjects, 
that the statements of either work were consciously intended 
to qualify or to correct those of the other; and perhaps, in their 
treatment of the Fall itself and its consequences, they are 
in fundamental agreement. But since it is established, upon 
different grounds, that one of the two works must have been 
known to the author or authors of the other?, this possibility 
becomes a probability. Different opinions are held, however, 
as to which book preceded and influenced.the other; and the 
complexity of the problem is further increased by the possi- 
bility (and indeed the probability, in the case of one of them), 
that each work is composite in structure* It is very likely, 
as has here been urged, that the language in which the 
orthodox Jewish doctrine is expressed in the Ajpocalypse of 
Laruch (liv. 15, 19) owes its singular and unique pointed- 
ness to opposition to existing, and familiarly known, diverse 
teaching. But this need not imply a knowledge of, and an 
allusion to, 4 Ezra, rather than contact with Christian thought 
as moulded by S. Paul, or with a circle of Jewish thought 
which produced both S. Paul and Pseudo-Ezra. On the 
other hand, the language of 4 Ezra need not have been 
determined by particular reference to the standpoint of the 
Apocalypse of Baruch, which is that of the orthodox con- 
temporary Judaism. It may have been influenced by contact 
with Pauline teaching, or, as is suggested in the able intro- 
duction to 4 Ezra by Prof. Gunkel®, the writer may have been 
independently led to a similar view, with regard to inherent 
sinfulness, to that which was arrived at by S. Paul, starting: 
from the same basis of received Jewish teaching. Judaism 
already possessed, to some extent, a belief in such inherent 
sinfulness, though this was not, as a rule, attributed to the sin 
of Adam. And Judaism humbled, as we see it in this book 


1 See Thackeray, Art. 2 £sdras, in Hastings’ . Yctfonary of the Bible, vol. 1., 
and Ryssel, in Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen, S. 405. 

> See, ¢.g., Schiirer, Hestory of the Jewish People, etc., E.T., Div. 11. vol. 11.3 
Charles, Apocalypse of Baruch, the Introductions to the two books in Kautzsch, 
op. cit. ; also the works of Kabisch and De Faye. Gunkel and others maintain the 
substantial unity of 4 Ezra. 

3 In Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen des A.T. 


222 The Fall and Original 572 [CHAP. 


of Ezra, almost to despair; Judaism compelled to brood more 
earnestly and more introspectively than ever before over the 
world’s pain and sin; Judaism tortured with an involuntary 
doubt in the efficacy and self-sufficiency .of the Law without 
and man’s capacity for good works within, is surely a soil from 
which might grow, naturally and spontaneously, doctrines such 
as those of a universal fall and of ingrained sinfulness: doctrines 
which, whether separate, as in Judaism, or interconnected, as 
in the Christian Church, are but attempts to interpret to the 
reason the soul’s sense of helplessness and sin. What the 
Christian consciousness did for S. Paul, if indeed it was not 
already done when he became a Christian, might very well 
have been done for Pseudo-Ezra by the deepened earnestness 
and the heightened sense of sin wrought in him, in part, by 
the recent crisis in his nation’s history, and yet more effec- 
tually by the internal struggle to retain his national faith, 
which, in the writer’s very attempt to justify it to himself, 
seems to be sadly confessing its. inevitable insufficiency’. 
There is much in common, amidst much difference, between 
the religious thought of Pseudo-Ezra and that of 5. Paul: quite 
enough to have enabled them independently to reach similar 
doctrines of human sinfulness by very similar roads. But 
whether the one who, though breaking in part with Jewish 
orthodoxy, still remained theologically a Jew, was guided to 
a somewhat non-Jewish doctrine by his own independent 
thought, or whether the beliefs and feelings which he shared 
with S. Paul prepared him for an actual reception of the 
apostle’s deeper teaching with regard to human infirmity and 
‘spiritual incapacity, is a question which, though full of interest, 
is at present far from answerable wits finality. In so far as 
the teaching of these two writers as to sin is really connected 
with the Fall-story, there is perhaps no difference between 
them. S. Paul took his premiss from the same tradition as 
Pseudo-Ezra. 

The assertion that Pseudo-Ezra’s teaching as to inherent 
sinfulness approximates, in some respects, rather to that of 


1 Read from this point of view, 4 Ezra is surely one of the most pathetic 
of books. It also records ‘‘the most serious and impassioned struggle with ine 
problem of sin and evil from a Jew of this period.” (Porter.) 


1Χ] 7 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 223 


the Christian Church than to that of the Jewish synagogue, 
an assertion which has been made more than once in the 
preceding pages, only requires a perusal of his apocalypse for 
its proof. ; 

This writer’s sense of sin, whether personal, national or 
universal, colours his book so deeply that it is unnecessary 
to quote individual passages in which it is especially empha- 
sised'. It is with his explanation of the origin of universal 
sinfulness that we are principally concerned. 

This, it can easily be shown, is, in the letter, the same 
as that usually given in purely Jewish literature. It differs 
from it rather in the sense of being a marked advance upon 
it, or a development from it, than in that of being an al- 
together new production, out of relation to what had gone 
before. 

The earlier apocalyptic writings generally attributed the 
origin of human sinfulness to the watchers; and its prevalence 
was sometimes regarded as due in part to the continued 
instigation of demons, as well as to the influence upon each 
individual of his hopelessly corrupted human environment. 
The earliest scribes, if we may judge from the book Eccle- 
siasticus, saw in Adam and Eve the ‘beginning of sin,’ but 
not, in their sin, the source or cause of inherited and universal 
depravity. The first,parents of the race very soon came to 
be regarded, in all the schools of Jewish thought, as the cause, 
to their descendants, of physical woes and death; and the Fall 
was very commonly supposed to have affected for the worse 
the lower creatures and the course of nature. Now the 
apocalypse of Ezra completely abandons the legend of the 
watchers ; it contains no allusion to those beings, even in a 
passage in which the early history of the world, as recorded 
in the Old Testament, is rapidly passed in review. Sin is 
traced exclusively to Adam and Eve for its beginning, to 
man’s created nature for its provocative cause, and to his will 
for its actuality. Satan, his fall and his envy, are likewise 
never mentioned ; and the puerilities of both apocalyptic and 

1 See, ¢.g., iii. 8, 12, 13, 35, 363; Iv. 39; vil. 46, 68; viii. 35; in addition to 


passages mentioned incidentally in the following pages. 
ες δὲς 


224 The Fall and Original Sin |CHAP. 


midrashic haggada are conspicuously absent. The writer 
trusts rather to his own thought than to the more fanciful 
of traditions. 

4 Ezra, in common with all Jewish pseudepigraphic litera- 
ture of the time, regards Adam as the cause of physical 
death to all who are born from him!: “And unto him thou 
gavest thy one commandment; which he transgressed, and 
immediately thou appointedst death for him and in his gene- 
rations.” The book also echoes the belief in cosmical 
consequences of the Fall?: “And when Adam transgressed 
my statutes, then was decreed that now is done. Then were 
the entrances of this world made narrow, and sorrowful, and 
toilsome: they are but few and evil, full of perils, and charged 
with great toils.” Thus far then Pseudo-Ezra jis in perfect 
harmony with current Jewish views as to the Fall. And the 
agreement goes a step further. For the Apocalypse of Baruch, 
typical of the orthodoxy of that day, in one passage asserts 
Adam to have been the cause of wrath and punishment to 
his posterity in the world to come. This passage has already | 
been found to be a source of trouble to the critic, because, 
unless it is an interpolation, which is not proved, it has 
hitherto seemed difficult to reconcile with the very rigid 
insistence of that book on the undiminished freedom and 
responsibility of the individual to work out his own spiritual 
destiny. Now in so far as the consequences of the Fall go, 
the teaching of 4 Ezra does not seem to differ from that of 
the Apocalypse of Baruch. Both apocalypses assert that the 
punishment for Adam’s sin has devolved also upon Adam’s 
posterity, and neither of them maintains that the Fall pro- 
duced in human nature an inherited spiritual infirmity. 

But here the two writings begin to diverge. The Afoca- 
lypse of Baruch has little to say of inherent infirmity, whence- 


lai. 7. £¢ huic mandasti diligentiam unam tuam; et praeteriuit eam, et 
statim tnstitutsti tn eum mortem et in nationibus ejus [Syr. (cf. Aeth.) et in 
generationes ejus; Arm. et omnibus quae ex tllo gentes erant|. In citations from 
the Latin, Dr James’ (Bensly’s) text has been used, Zexts and Studies, vol. 111. 3 
English quotations are from the R.V. 

2 vil. r1, 12. Cf. Rom. viii. 20, 22. The earth’s sorrow for man’s evil, a 
different idea but one closely associated with S. Paul’s words, is described in 
4 Ezra x. 9 ff.; also the earth’s hope in xi. 46. 


| 


IX] 72 Jewish Pseudefigraphic Writings 225 


soever derived. It is concerned with emphasising, in the 
strongest manner, the unaltered freedom and capacity of the 
individual to be blameless and to procure salvation, Adam’s 
transgression and human frailty notwithstanding. Pseudo- 
Ezra, on the other hand, emphasises human infirmity, but he 
too does not trace this infirmity to the Fall as its cause. 

It is the implanted seed of evil ripened into corruption 
and sinfulness of heart, the disposition apparently trans- 
mitted physically from Adam to his posterity, though not 
created or caused by Adam, on which the writer of 4 Ezra 
strongly insists. He shifts the centre of gravity of the problem 
from emphasis on man’s freedom to emphasis on man’s cor- 
ruption and infirmity in spite of his remnant of responsibility 
and self-determination. The difference between his teaching 
and that characteristic of Judaism generally is, however, one 
of degree rather than of kind. It is the difference between 
extreme points of view of the same facts rather than diversity 
of opinion as to what are the facts to be adjusted. It is the 
difference between more and less inwardness, and of more 
and less intellectual desire to trace sin to its ultimate source. 

It has been seen that the basis of such ideas concerning 
the source of sin or of hereditary sinfulness as the talmudists 
possessed was their doctrine that man was endowed from the 
first by the Creator Himself with the evil impulse or yezer 
hara. There can be no doubt that Pseudo-Ezra builds upon 
the same foundation. But his nomenclature is different from 
that of the rabbinic writings. He does not speak of the evil 
yezer by name’; and consequently there is room for inquiry 
as to which of his expressions (if they are not all synonyms, 
as is here maintained) is exactly the equivalent for the 
technical term yezer Hara, and what is then the relation to the 
thing signified by that phrase of the other evil dispositions 
which he attributes to human nature. 

That which is by far the most directly and naturally 
identifiable with the yezer hara of synagogue scholasticism 
is the “grain of evil seed” which “was sown in the heart of 


1 Except in vii. g2, cum eis plasmatum cogtfamentum malum, where we 
almost certainly have its Latin equivalent. 


Tt: 15 


226 The Fall and Original Sin (CHAP. 


Adam from the beginning!’ For it was generally agreed 
that the evil yvezer was implanted in Adam by God when He 
created him ; it was not put into him by the tempter, nor did 
Adam makeit himself. Hilgenfeld assumes that the evil seed 
of which the writer of 4 Ezra speaks was received by Adam 
through the temptation of the devil?; but this assumption ts 
altogether gratuitous: the book never alludes to the tempta- 
tion, or the tempter, of Adam, and the creation of the yezer 
by God was a universal belief at the time when 4 Ezra was 
written. It is safe therefore to identify the ‘grain of evil 
seed, to which the whole evil history of the world is ulti- 
mately traced in this apocalypse, with the God-implanted evil 
impulse familiar to the reader of rabbinic haggada. 

But before arriving at the passage to which allusion has 
just been made we find that the writer has already spoken of 
an “evil heart” (cor malignum) as existing, not only in the 
generations of mankind, but in the first Adam, and as ex- 
isting in him, apparently, when he fell, if not as the immediate 
cause of his transgression*, Inasmuch as this cor malignum 
was in Adam when he sinned, it seems to be identical with 
the granum seminis malt or yezer hara. “It explains Adam’s 
sin, but is not explained by it*”’ It is not a consequence of 
the Fall, either as an aggravated form of the yezer induced by 
Adam’s yielding to its mastery, or as something introduced 
anew by Adam’s sin. According to Dr Charles, however, we 
are to see in the cor malignum a development of the granuim 
malt seminis, consequent upon acquiescence in the promptings 
of the evil impulse, which of itself, being made by God, is not 
to be supposed to be of the nature of sin though it is the 

1 iv. 20,31. Quoniam granum seminis mali seminatum est in corde Adam ab 
initio, et quantum impietatis generavit usque nunc et generabit usque cum veniat 
area. Aestima autem apud te granum mali seminis quantum fructum impietatis 
generaverit. 

5 πιά. Apokalyptthk, S. 230. WKabisch (Zschatologie des Paulus, S. 1532) has gone 
further astray in identifying the ‘evil seed’ with the devil’s ¢zxgucnamentum 
(above p. 156 ff.) ; Clemen and Charles are in agreement with the position adopted 
here.. 

3 iii. 20, 21. Et non abstulisti ab eis cor malignum, ut faceret lex tua in eis 
fructum. Cor enim malignum baiolans primus Adam transgressus et victus est, 


sed et omnes qui ex eo nati sunt. 
4 Porter, of. δε p. 147: 


ΙΧ] 72 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 227 


source of sin. This view is said to be confirmed by the fact 
that the word dazolans (bearing) in the passage just cited is 
represented in the Syriac and Aethiopic versions by the 
equivalent for cam vestivit', implying that when Adam 
yielded to his inherent ‘seed’ of evil he established in himself 
an incipient evil state or disposition, and “clothed himself” 
with a wicked heart. But even if this be so, the fact remains 
that the development of the evil seed (or inclination) into the 
evil heart took place in Adam Jdefore his great sin; he fell 
because he already possessed the evil heart. The point in 
question, whether the evil heart is to be taken as identical 
with the evil seed, or as a development of it induced by in- 
dulgence, thus becomes one of no importance. It is certainly 
not quite correct to represent Pseudo-Ezra as teaching that 
“a hereditary tendency to sin was created, and the cor 
malignum developed,” dy Adam’s.sin®. So far as the above 
statements of 4 Ezra go, the hereditary tendency to sin was 
implanted in Adam at the first*, and the cor malignum was 
the cause, and not the effect, of the first transgression. 

Not only was Adam overcome in consequence of possessing 
the cor malignum, but “also all that are born of him.” 
“Thus,” Pseudo-Ezra continues, “disease (27firmitas) was 
made permanent; and the law was in the heart of the people 
along with the wickedness of the root (cum malignitate 
radicis); so that the good departed away, and that which was 
wicked (malignum) abode 5111. The disease or infirmity 
which is here stated to have been made permanent in the 
race is not said to have been made so by the Fall; the per- 
manent infirmity seems to be simply the transmitted evil 


1 So Charles asserts, The Apocalypse of Baruch, p. 93; see also p. Ixx on 
the doctrine of 4 Ezra with regard to inherited sinfulness. ; 

2 Dr Charles, of. cz¢., p. Ixx. 

3 Of course, by God, though this is not expressly asserted. 

4 iii, 22. Cf. iii. 26: ‘Sin all things doing even as Adam and all his 
generations had done: for they also bore a wicked heart.” 

In the passage given above (iii. 22) we observe the contrast between the Law 
and ‘the wickedness of the root.’ This is the usual rabbinical contrast of the 
torah and the yezer hara; and thus is confirmed the supposition that ‘the wicked- 
ness of the root’ is yet another synonym for the evil inclination. In iii. 20 it is 
stated that the cor malignum was not removed from the Israelites when the Law 
was given at Sinai. 

I5—2 


228 The Fall and Original Sin  [CHAP. 


inclination, or the universal following of Adam’s example in 
yielding to it. Herein the author of 4 Ezra stops short of the 
doctrine of S. Augustine; he teaches that man inherits a 
corrupt heart only in the sense that the evil inclination 
belongs to his nature as it did to that of Adam before the 
Fall, and not in the sense that he inherits a nature which 
became evil only in consequence of Adam’s sin. It is true 
that Pseudo-Ezra seems to regard the evil inclination as 
having been allowed, through indulgence, to gain in the 
whole race an abnormal power, or as having established its 
mastery ; but there is no sign that he considers this as having 
been done once and for all in Adam’s sin. Thus it is said: 
“an evil heart hath grown up (z#crvevit) in us, which hath 
led us astray from these statutes, and hath brought us into 
corruption and into the ways of death, hath showed us the 
paths of perdition and removed us far from life; and that, not 
a few only, but well-nigh all that have been created *.” 

But along with this development of the yezer doctrine, 
which, apparently, is not associated at all with the Fall of 
Adam and which therefore is theoretically different from the 
ecclesiastical doctrine of Original Sin, though in practical 
tendency equivalent to it, we find also in 4 Ezra, as in one 
passage of the Apocalypse of Baruch, an explicit statement 
that Adam’s transgression was attended with spiritual, as well 
as merely physical, consequences for his posterity. We find, 
that is to say, a doctrine of Original Sin; though it is not easy 
to decide with which of the specific varieties of that doctrine, 
such as differentiated themselves afterwards in the Christian 
Church, if with any, Pseudo-Ezra’s teaching is to be identified. 

The influence of Adam’s fall upon the spiritual destiny of 
the race is implied in the reflection that it would have been 
better if Adam had not been formed, or at least had been 
restrained from sinning; and it is most definitely affirmed in 
the statement that his fall, though his act alone, was in some 
undefined sense our fall also. Thus’: “I answered then and 
said, This is my first and last saying, that it had been better 
that the earth had not given ¢#ee Adam: or else when it had 


1 vii. 48. 2 vil. 116 ff. 


ΙΧ] 222 Jewish Pseudepbigraphic Writings 229 


given him, to have restrained him from sinning. For what 
profit is it for all that are in this present time to live in 
heaviness, and after death to look for punishment? O thou 
Adam, what hast thou done? for though it was thou that 
sinnest, the evil is not fallen on thee alone, but upon all of us 
that come of thee. For what profit is it unto us, if there be 
promised us an immortal time, whereas we have done the 
works that bring death??” 

This passage asserts that ‘the evil’ resulting from Adam’s 
sin fell upon his posterity also (R.V.), or that his deed con- 
stituted our fall as well as his (Lat.), though the actual sin 
was Adam’s alone. We might conclude that the meaning 
was here the same as that which we read in the parallel 
passage of Baruch; ze. that men were constituted sinners 
objectively by divine appointment, the punishment of Adam 
being visited upon his posterity ‘without fault on their part. 
But the concluding words of the citation seem to imply that 
this was not quite all that was present to Pseudo-Ezra’s mind. 
Adam has brought the evil upon us, and yet we also “have 
done the works that bring death.’ These are the two 
selfsame propositions which are placed side by side by 
S. Paul in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans; 
and here, as there, the link which should connect them is not 
supplied. In neither place is it explained how Adam’s sin 
made his posterity sinful. Perhaps in neither case had the 
writer developed or received any definite theory on the 
point. 

There is no doubt, then, that 4 Ezra teaches a doctrine of 
Original Sin ; spiritual consequences were entailed by Adam’s 
fall upon his posterity ; but how they were mediated is left an 
open question. On the other hand, the actual sinfulness of all 
mankind is taught to ΡῈ due to the possession of the evil 
heart or inclination which was in Adam before his sin; and 
in the passages which embody this side of Pseudo-Ezra’s 
teaching it is nowhere stated that the aggravation of the 


1 The Latin of verses 118—r19 is as follows: O tu quid fecisti Adam? Si 
enim tu peccasti, non est factum solius tuus casus sed et nostrum qui ex te adveni- 
mus. Quid enim nobis prodest si promissum est nobis immortale tempus, nos 
vero mortalia opera egimus ? 


230 ~The Fall and Original ΟἿ |CHAP. 


power of the evil impulse is a consequence of the first 
transgression’. 

The permanent infirmity established in the race would 
thus appear, from what Pseudo-Ezra says, to be the result 
of indulgence, by individual members of mankind, of the 
divinely implanted ‘evil disposition, the natural tendency of 
the stock. The bias is regarded as so strong, moreover, that 
only with extreme difficulty can it be resisted?; and con- 
sequently only few will be saved*. 

And yet man’s nature is not so ruined as to leave no room 
for free-will and responsibility. The aim of the writer is to 
justify the dealings of God, especially His punishment of the 
wicked ; and this he does by falling back upon the freedom 
of man’s will and the theoretical possibility, however difficult 
practically, of right determination and of good works. In one 
passage this freedom is traced to, or identified with, the στ 
of understanding *. It is frequently dwelt upon and empha- 
sised®; but it is never so pressed as to conflict with the 
doctrine of man’s infirmity or propensity to evil through his 
yeser, or that of Adam’s fall involving his posterity in some of 
its consequences: doctrines which have been shown to be 
characteristic of this book. 

The relation of the teaching of 4 Ezra to that of 
the Apocalypse of Baruch, on the one hand, and to that of 
S. Paul, on the other, is difficult to define precisely. The 
language of each writer is too indefinite to admit of a rigor- 
ously systematic theory being extracted from his unconnected, 
and apparently inconsistent, statements. The same elements 


1 This latter view is attributed to the writer of the apocalypse, however, by 
Dr Charles (Apocalypse of Baruch, pp. 92—3, Ixx—Ixxi; cf., for similar 
estimates of the doctrine of 4 Ezra, Rosenthal, Vrer afokr. Biicher, and Eders- 
heim, Lzfe and Times etc., vol. 1. p. 167, n. Schiefer, writing in the Zeitschrift 
f. wissenschaftl. Theologie, 1901, on Das Problem der Stinde im 4. Esrabuch, 
says: “Klipp und klar wird hier die Theorie von der Erbsiinde ausgesprochen.” 

2 vil. 92. Ordo primus, quoniam cum labore multo certati sunt ut vincerent 
cum eis plasmatum cogitamentum malum, ut non eos seducat a vita ad mortem. 
Here the yezer hara is alluded to; this was ‘fashioned together with’ each 
individual. 

* See δ᾽ Vil ΠΟ} τ 0: ΙΧ τῇ: 

νι Ὁ) 

5 vil. 21—26, 127-131} Vill. 56—62 ; ix. II. 


ΙΧ] 72 Jewish Pseudepigraphic Writings 2831 


underlie the doctrine of all, though each of the three writers 
places the emphasis differently. Baruch, like Pelagius at a 
later period, champions individual freedom ; he is silent about 
the evil heart, and is legalistic in his attitude towards sin, 
though admitting that the Fall has somehow been a spiritual 
catastrophe affecting all generations. Ezra’s use of the yezer 
doctrine, like S. Paul’s teaching as to the flesh and the spirit, 
which superficially resembles it, is not definitely brought into 
relation with the doctrine of Original Sin, which, in some form, 
is Clearly held both by Pseudo-Ezra and S. Paul. Nothing is 
definitely known as to actual literary relations between any 
of these three apparently contemporary writers?. But we 
have seen no reason to suppose that, for his doctrine of sin, 


1 Dr Rosenthal, in his Vier Apokryphische Biicher, has endeavoured to trace 
4 Ezra to the school of R. Elieser B. Hirkanos. Several talmudic students have 
pronounced his assertion of Jamnian influence being traceable in the work, how- 
ever, to be very slenderly grounded. There seems indeed to be good talmudic 
evidence for the fact that R. Elieser insisted strongly upon the universal sinfulness 
of man (Sazhedr. to1 a), and that he taught that even the patriarchs were but 
imperfectly holy (drach. 17 a: ‘‘If the Holy One, blessed be He! should enter 
into judgment with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, they would not be able to stand 
before the proving”). Dr Rosenthal does not support by any evidence, however, 
his further assertion that R. Elieser derived this universal sinfulness from Adam’s 
fall (S. 60). He sees in this doctrine one of the points of contact between the Rabbi 
in question and Jewish Christians; but the proof which he offers seems to be very 
far-fetched and precarious. R. Elieser’s relations with Jewish Christians, so far 
as actual evidence exists, appear to be reducible to an incident which he himself 
records (7osefta Chulin, 2. 24), viz. the meeting in the streets of Sepphoris with 
Jacob of Kephar Sechariah, and expressing his agreement with a Christian in- 
terpretation, which that reputed disciple of Christianity communicated to him, of 
Deut. xxiii. 18 and Mic. i. 7. This incident is related in Derenbourg’s //7stotre 
de la Palestine, pp. 357 ff. ; Gratz, Geschichte der Juden, Bd. tv. S. 53; Bacher, 
Die Agada der Tannaiten, Bd. 1. 5. 113. The words ‘from dirt they came and 
to dirt they shall go forth” (Baraita Aboda Zara, 17a}; Midr. Rabba, Kohel. 1. 8), 
contained in R. Elieser’s reply, are taken by Rosenthal necessarily to imply the 
doctrine of Original Sin, of which he supposes the Rabbi thus to express his 
approval. They do not all suggest the idea, however, that the traces of a sinful 
origin remain and are never lost; and such an interpretation has no relevancy 
whatever to the passage with which they are associated. The one doctrine at all 
akin to that of Original Sin which we have any reason to attribute to R. Elieser is 
therefore that of universal sinfulness without exception of the patriarchs. But this 
would appear (Justin Martyr, Dial. c. 7ryph. 95) to have been the prevalent 
view amongst the Jewish teachers at that day. The representation of the serpent 
as the instrument of Satan and as inspired by him, ascribed to R. Elieser (Prrke 
di R. Elieser, c. 13), is not a proof of Christian influence (see above p. 158); and, 


232 The Fall and Original 5172 |CHAP. 


Pseudo-Ezra was dependent on Christian sources. It is 
unfair to suppose that religious inwardness was necessarily 
lacking to anon-Christian Jew; and it is certainly an exaggera- 
tion to assert, as has frequently been represented, that Judaism 
possessed no doctrine of Original Sin. 


APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IX, 


Incidental Allusions to the Fall in Undoubtedly Christian 
Apocryphal Writings. 


In the Visto Pauli c. 45 (Lat. version, ed. James, Zerts 
and Studies, vol. 11.) occurs an allusion to the Fall as the 
cause of mortality: 

Et tenuit mihi manum et duxit me juxta arborem cognos- 
cende bone et male; et dixit: Haec est arbor per quem mors 
ingressa est in saeculo et ex ea accipiens a muliere sua Adam 
manducavit et ingressa est mors in mundo. 


The Apocalypse of Sedrach, which seems to be based upon 
4 Ezra, and to continue, from a Christian point of view, the 
discussion in that writing of the origin of evil, contains a 
passage relevant to our subject. In cc. 3 and 4 the question 
is asked: if God created all things for man, why his affliction? 
Placed in Paradise and threatened with death if he ate the 
forbidden tree, he was led astray by the devil, we are told, and 
did eat. This, however, was by the will of God. There will 
also be found here the legend that God ordered the angels to 
worship Adam, to which reference has previously been made. 

The introduction of death at the Fall, both physical and 
eternal, is mentioned also in Zhe Acts and Martyrdom of 
Andrew: “ For the first man through the tree of transgression 
brought in death.” 
moreover, the Pirke is a late book containing much that R. Elieser probably never 
taught. 

Thus it has neither been proved that R. Elieser held any specifically Christian 
doctrines nor that he had any connexion with the author of 4 Ezra. 

Tottermann, in a small work on R. Elieser, believes that this Rabbi incurred 
the suspicion of Christian tendencies not without injustice, and that in many ways 
he was nearer to the Christian than the Pharisaic standpoint. 


Friedlander, Vorchristl. για. Gnosticismus, S. 73 ff. denies that the Jacob 
mentioned above was a Christian, and asserts him to have been a Gnostic. 


IX] 221 Christian Pseudepigraphic Writings 233 


“And since the first man, who brought death into the 
world through the transgression of the tree, had been pro- 
duced from the spotless earth, it was necessary that the Son > 
of God-should be begotten a perfect man from the spotless 
virgin, that He should restore eternal life, which man had lost 
through Adam, and should cut off (shut out) the tree of carnal 
appetite through the tree of the Cross.” Azte-Nicene Library, 
vol. XVI. p. 338. 

In Narratio Zosimi (Texts and Studies, vol. 11.) the devil 
is represented (c. 19) as saying that he entered into the 
serpent as an instrument (σκεῦος), by which to tempt man to 
disobedience, because man had been made sinless and blessed 
above the angels. 

C. 6 contains the passage: καὶ ἐβόησεν ὁ ἄνθρωπος τοῦ 
θεοῦ λέγων: Οἴμοι, ὅτι (ἡ) ἱστορία τοῦ ᾿Αδὰμ (év) ἐμοὶ 
ἀνεκεφαλαιώθη. ἐκεῖνον γὰρ διὰ τῆς Εὔας ἠπάτησεν ὁ Σα- 
TOPOS 10 ss 

The Bohatric Account of the Death of Joseph (Texts and 
Studies, vol. IV.) attributes death to the sin of Adam (xxviii. 
ΠΤ 131A xx kek me ns ἢ xx Vill 13'--> but because 
of the transgression of Adam this great trouble has come upon 
all mankind, and this great necessity of death.” Cf. Zhe Bo- 
hatric Account of the Falling Asleep of Mary (op. cit.). 

The same point is referred to again in Zhe History of 
Joseph the Carpenter, c. 31: “And our Saviour answered and 
said: Indeed, the prophecy of my Father upon Adam, for his 
disobedience, has now been fulfilled.” Ante-Nicene Library, 
ΨΥ ΠΡ. 70: 


The Conflict of S. Peter (Malan’s tr. from the Aethiopic, 
p. 5) has the passage: “ For the first man, the old Adam that 
was born in me, appeared as chief (ov first); it was the old 
birth, removed by this death: Adam fell by losing his glory.” 


In Lhe Conflict of S. Thomas (ibid. p. 207), the serpent 
encountered by S. Thomas claims to have been the tempter 
of Eve and the sender of angels from above (referring to 
Gen. vi. 1-4). Yet the serpent is not identified with the 
devil: “I am akin to him who came from the East, and to 
whom power was given to do what he liked in the earth.” 


234 Lhe Fall in Christian Pseudepigrapha 


In The Conflict of S. Andrew (ibid. p. 105) Satan is 
distinguished from the devil ‘his father, 


The Acts of Philip similarly states that the serpent is the 
son of the wicked one; his father is the devil (A. VV. Library, 
vol. XVI. p. 302). The following passage also occurs here: 

“Take away from yourselves the wicked disposition, that 
is, the evil desires, through which the serpent, the wicked 
dragon, the prince of evil, has produced the pasture of 
destruction and the death of the soul, since all the desire of 
the wicked has proceeded from him....... The poison of 
wickedness is in him.” 

In the text of this work in Codex Baroccianus there is 
a passage, quoted in Zerts and Studies, vol. 11. no. 3, p. 158, 
of which Dr James says: “The drift of this is not very plain: 
but it seems to be a version of the well-known legend... 
that the angels were called upon to adore the newly-created 
Adam, and that certain of them through pride and envy 
refused to do so. In this passage, their jealousy is materialised 
and takes the form of the serpent.” 


In the Gospel of Nicodemus (c. 23; ed. Thilo, p. 736), 
occur the words: ὦ ἀρχιδιάβολε, ἡ τοῦ θανάτου ἀρχή, ἡ ῥίζα 
τῆς ἁμαρτίας. 

Of course this catena is not intended to be exhaustive. 
The passages are given as samples of the treatment which the 
story of the Fall continued to receive.at the hands of popular 
writers. They are of no doctrinal interest. 


{ΓΙ Κι χι 


THE GROWTH OF CHES ΟΟΟΘΕΙ ΝΕ ΟΕ ΗΕ ΚΑΙ AND 
Ure tls ΕΠ ΝΕ Sern lt: WISH LITERATURE AS TA 
WHOLE. 


THE method of treatment adopted in the preceding 
chapters has been that of examining the various sources, 
arranged according to such rough classification as was most 
natural and convenient, for their respective contributions to 
the history of the Jewish? exegesis of the Fall-story and to 
the building up of the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin. 
This plan has perhaps proved serviceable to the student of 
-minutiae, though it may have carried with it the disadvantage 
of presenting him with the facts without any framework to 
give them coherence and logical arrangement, and of so 
rendering it difficult for him “to see the wood for the trees.” 
It is intended therefore, in the present chapter, in spite of the 
repetition which will necessarily be involved, briefly to collect 
together the more important facts which have thus been 
dealt with in their literary context, and to arrange them 
according, not to source, but to subject-matter ; so that some 
general idea may the more easily be gained as to the historical 
development of the doctrine of the Fall as a whole, and of its 
constituent elements in particular. This treatment of the 
subject, it may be borne in mind, cannot be so objective as 
that pursued in the previous chapters; for when logical takes 
the place of historical and literary arrangement, the facts 
must needs be presented in some kind of perspective, and be 
woven into some kind of general theory of development ; and 
here begins increased scope for error, because of increased 
necessity for tentative speculation. 


230 Growth of Jewish doctrine — |CHAP. 


The Fall-stories of Gen. vi. 1—4 and Gen, 111. 


When we consider the usage, in the various uncanon- 
ical books reviewed in the foregoing chapters, of the legend 
of the descent of the watchers, the idea suggests itself 
that this, rather than the Paradise-story of Genesis, was the 
earliest basis for popular Jewish speculation as to the origin 
of the general sinfulness of the world. The most ancient 
portion of the literature which has been examined is probably 
the groundwork of the Book of Enoch. This would seem 
to have been written before Ecclesiasticus, and to embody 
folk-lore which was then matter of ancient tradition. As has 
been already observed, the groundwork of Fzoch uses the 
legend of the watchers apparently with the full intention of 
thereby accounting, not necessarily for the first sinful human 
act, but for the origin of widespread depravity. The fall 
of the race and the beginning of the unsatisfactory moral 
condition of humanity as a whol@seem there to be traced 
to the lustful invasion of the world by these fallen celestial 
visitors. And it is equally noticeable that the Paradise-story, 
although it is perfectly well known to the earliest Enoch- 
literature, is completely ignored as a key to the problem of 
evil, in which so much interest seems to be shown. 

Assuming, then, as probable the view, already advocated 
in a preceding chapter, that the elohim-legend of Gen. vi. at 
first served the purpose afterwards fulfilled by the Paradise- 
story, we may next observe that, in passing from the 
earliest apocalyptic literature down to the latest with which 
we have here been concerned, there is a gradual change in 
the emphasis laid upon the legend of the watchers and the 
narrative of the loss of Eden respectively ; the one advancing 
as the other recedes in importance as regards the doctrinal 
inferences drawn from them. In the Similitudes of the Book 
of Enoch the story of the angels differs in important respects 
from that presented in the groundwork of the same book, 
but is still preferred to the narrative contained in Gen. iii. as 
a starting-point for the history of the origin and spread of 
human sin. In the Zestaments of the Twelve Patriarchs the 
legend of the watchers is frequently referred to, but is not 


Χ] on the Fall 237 


made the basis for any treatment of the general problem of 
sin. The Book of Jubtlees, which is a commentary on Genesis, 
only uses the story to explain the degeneracy which called 
forth the Deluge; it rather turns to the Paradise-narrative 
for an explanation of the evil of the world, though it is the 
physical and cosmical, more than the moral, consequences of 
the fall of the first parents upon which it dwells. The book 
represents, therefore, in this connexion, the same level of 
development as Ecclesiasticus, which traces death, but not 
man’s present moral state, to the first sin. The same position 
appears again in Pseudo-Philo; and the Testament of Abraham, 
like the Enoch-literature, knows the Fall-story but fails to 
make doctrinal use of it, even though the opportunity to do 
so lies very close at hand. In the Apocalypse of Abraham we 
seem to meet with a fusion of the streams of folk-lore based 
respectively on Gen. ili. and Gen. vi. 1—4. The writer makes 
the former narrative his starting-point for the history of the 
race, and speaks of the serpent-like tempter; this being, 
however, is not the serpent pure and simple of the Bible 
account, but Azazel, who so frequently appears as the central 
figure of the other group of legends which connected them- 
selves with the opening verses of Gen. vi. Here, perhaps, 
we get a glimpse of the manner in which the story of 
Paradise came to possess the significance, for speculation on 
the problem of human sin, which it afterwards increasingly 
manifested, and of which, at first, it would seem to have been 
devoid. It has been noticed, moreover, that the tempter of 
Eve is elsewhere identified with Satanail or with Gadreel : 
names which, like Azazel, are also prominent in some accounts 
of the descent of the watchers and the corruption of man- 
kind by them. There are thus signs of confusion of the two 
totally distinct biblical stories, which resulted, it would seem, in 
detaching the idea of the fall of the race from the setting in 
which it first grew up, and transplanting it to the history of 
the first temptation and the loss of Paradise. It is noticeable 
too, that when at first the narrative of Gen. iii. began to be 
used as a history of a universal fall, the serpent was identified 
with, or exchanged for, a Satan, and that the motive of envy 
was ascribed to him; and these points perhaps betray the 


238 Growth of Jewish doctrine — |CHAP. 


previous existence of a belief in the fall of the devil or of a 
class of spirits. 

As we pass on to the maturer products of the apocalyptic 
class of literature we find that the legend of the watchers 
drops more and more out of sight, whilst the Paradise-story 
grows more and more both in content and in significance. In 
the Slavonic Look of Enoch the former legend is referred to 
only as supplying the cause for the Deluge; in the Afocalypse 
of Baruch it is merely alluded to, and no use is made of it; 
whilst, finally, in 4 Ezra it vanishes altogether. 


Development of Doctrine from Gen, 111. 


Meanwhile the Fall-story has come to serve for much 
more than an explanation of human death. Such was the 
earliest doctrinal purpose tq which it was put, though even 
this usage appears for the first time as late as the time of 
Ben Sira, and was tardily adopted, it would appear, in 
rabbinic circles, for generations afterwards. But in the Book 
of Jubilees the fall of Adam is regarded as initiating a 
stream of cosmical effects!; and the derangement of Nature 
thus brought about assumes more imposing proportions in 
the apocalypses of Baruch and Ezra and the later midrashic 
literature. Last of all, spiritual consequences for the whole 
race are traced to Adam’s transgression. If the facts are 
sufficiently numerous to admit of any generalisation from 
them that is not wholly precarious, passages referred to in 
the foregoing chapters would seem to imply that the heredity 
of a sinful bias or taint of evil (apart from its derivation from 
Adam) was an idea fairly familiar to Alexandrian writers; 
whereas the Palestinian school were more inclined to express 
their thought as to the effects of the first father’s sin upon 
the spiritual condition of his posterity in terms which rather 
suggest what modern divines would call a theory of imputa- 
tion. Certainly Alexandrian writers, such as Pseudo-Solomon 
and Philo, mention particular cases of hereditary sinfulness ; 


1 The influence of human sin, though not of the fall of Adam, on the course 
of Nature had already been believed by the writer of the earlier portion of the 
Book of Enoch; see p. 185, n. 2. 


x| on the Fall 230 


and the first definite appearance of the idea that mankind 
inherit from Adam, and as a consequence of his transgression, a 
moral infirmity of nature, is to be found in the A recension of 
Slavonic Enoch, which there is some reason to believe to have 
been written in Egypt. It will be remembered that a very 
similar doctrine of the Fall is implied in the Apocalypse of 
Moses, one of the earliest Adam-books’; but inasmuch as we 
do not possess this work in its original Jewish form, it is 
impossible to feel quite certain that its teaching on the 
question of Original Sin, certainly very unusual for an early 
Jewish book, is really ancient. On the other hand the Fall 
seems to be regarded by the writer of the Apocalypse of 
Baruch (Syriac) as having brought upon the whole race 
liability to future punishment, from which it is only possible 
for the individual to escape through perfect blamelessness of 
life, and as thus having materially affected the spiritual destiny 
of all men notwithstanding the fact that everyone is re- 
sponsible for taking these consequences to himself, and is, in 
fact, ultimately, “the Adam of his own soul®.” Pseudo-Ezra’s 
teaching as to the Fall and Original Sin is very similar to this 
in so far as itis purely teaching as to the Fall and Original Sin. 
But it is so much qualified by his doctrine of the evil heart or 
yeser hara, which, however, as has here been maintained, is 
not logically connected, or theoretically interwoven, with his 
speculation on the results of the first transgression, that, as a 
whole, his treatment of man’s moral state is widely divergent 
from that of his contemporary. While Baruch tries to mini- 
mise such effects of the Fall upon man’s spiritual state as he 
admits, by insisting on the individual’s undiminished freedom 
and responsibility, Ezra is full of the sense of human infirmity 
derived, not by heredity from fallen Adam, but from “the 
following of Adam” in indulging the evil impulse which ts in 
us at birth as it was in Adam when he came from the hand 
of God. Our sinfulness is to Adam’s as fruit is to seed; but 
the connexion, for Pseudo-Ezra, is historical, not causal. 

We thus find Judaism, at the beginning of the Christian 
era, in possession of two distinct conceptions of Original Sin: 

Weep. 1 08. 


? For a view identical with this or the foregoing teaching as to Original Sin, 
SRE D701, 


240 Growth of Jewish doctrine — [CHAP. 


the one, presumably originating from the school of Alex- 
andria, more closely parallel to part of the late Augustinian 
theory, and stated in terms of the idea of inherited infirmity ; 
the other, so indefinitely formulated that the connecting link 
between Adam’s sin and his posterity’s punishment is not 
expressed, though it seems to be simply the divine appoint- 
ment, suggesting as the nearest analogy some form of the 
imputation doctrine prevalent during the Reformation period. 

The step from such purely Jewish teaching to that of 
S. Paul, which is similarly indefinite, will already seem to be 
but slight. The contents of the following chapter must not 
be anticipated here: but perhaps it will even now be apparent 
that the doctrine of Original Sin is not to be looked upon as 
the creation of S. Paul, any more than it is to be regarded as 
having its source in the Old Testament. 

The stages of the development from the narrative of the 
third chapter of Genesis to the almost full-grown doctrine of 
a fall of the race in Adam and the heredity of its consequences, 
have now been described in so far as the materials render 
such description possible. Or would it not be more correct to 
say, that the gulf between the biblical narrative and the 
ecclesiastical doctrine has been more plainly revealed by 
means of the literature which has been reviewed? Perhaps 
there is truth in both these modes of regarding the facts. 
Certainly there are gaps in the chain which Jewish literature 
alone does not enable us to fill up. The Adam, the tempter, 
the consequences of the first sin, of the pseudepigraphic and 
rabbinical writings are very different from the Adam, the 
tempter, and the consequences of the first sin which we meet 
with in the naive story of Genesis. And the doctrines whose 
history this work endeavours in part to describe are deduced 
from the Fall-story as it is told in these Jewish writings, not 
as it is told in the Hebrew narrative. The question arises 
again, and presents itself more forcibly than it did at an 
earlier stage of the inquiry: how did the transition from the 
Hebrew scenery of the Fall-story to that of its Jewish setting 
come about? And a similar question might be put with 
regard to the difference between the account, in Gen. vi., of 
the descent of the sons of God and the legend of the watchers. 

Two views have been suggested, between which future 


x| on the Fall 241 


inquiry must decide. It may be held, with Gunkel for 
instance, that the more highly embellished form of the 
legends as they appear in Jewish literature is due to the 
reappearance of their original characteristics, their ancient 
mythological dress which was largely stripped off them by 
their Old Testament editor. On the other hand it may be 
maintained that the traits ascribed to Adam, and the other 
figures of the story, in the Jewish period are not survivals | 
from remote antiquity, but new additions; that they are not 
even derived by exegetical methods from the biblical narrative, 
but are borrowed, in the first place, from foreign sources, and 
then read into the old, simple, national folk-lore. Thus the 
magnified Adam to which the writer of Job seems to refer, and 
whose first estate is so much glorified in pseudepigraphic and 
rabbinic literature, and the powerful spirit who, after his fall 
envied and tempted the first parents to their ruin, would have 
no connexion whatever, originally, with the corresponding 
figures in the Hebrew history. This latter view would seem 
to be much the more probable. In the first place it better 
explains the divergences and confusions in which the literature 
on the subject abounds ; such, for instance, as the conflicting 
statements as to the tempter of Eve, who is sometimes the 
serpent, sometimes the employer of the serpent, and some- 
times a Satan replacing the serpent. Secondly, legends of 
the descent of spirits and their intercourse with mankind, of 
the fall of angels, of the rivalry between the devil and man, of 
the wonderful trees such as we meet with in the pseudepi- 
srapha, wholly different from the biblical trees of knowledge 
and of life, and of various other things involved in the later 
treatment of the biblical Urgeschichte, are known to have 
existed in Persian, and perhaps other, mythologies to which 
the Jews, between the Captivity and the Christian era, easily 
had access!. These, however, are points upon which further 
light may be hoped for, and certainly is desirable. 


The development, within Jewish literature, of what may 


1 See on this subject Bousset, Die Religion des Judenthums im N.T. Zettalter, 
S. 331 ff., 461 ff. etc., and the references there given to papers of Bonwetsch, 
Griinbaum, and others. 


ay 16 


, 


242 Growth of Jewish doctrine — [CHAP. 


be called constituent elements of the doctrine of the Fall, or 
of beliefs immediately connected with it, may now be briefly 
traced. 


Adam in the unfallen state. 


Two passages contained in post-exilic Old Testament 
books were mentioned in a previous chapter which testify 
that, already in their time, ideas about the first man, whence- 
soever they were derived, such as are not at all suggested by 
the Jahvist history, were more or less familiar. The writer of 
Job seems to refer to a belief that the first man possessed 
extraordinary wisdom and had access to the divine council. 
Ezekiel’s analogy between Adam and the king of Tyre implies 
that he was familiar with a tradition which represented the 
first man as one who lived in great outward splendour. 

These two attributes, wisdom and splendour, were added 
to as speculation developed. 

Ben Sira observes (xlix. 16) that “above every living thing 
was the glory of Adam” (Heb.); but this is the whole of 
his contribution towards the exaltation of the first man. The 
author of Wzsdom seems to make little of Adam’s sin in 
comparison with Cain’s, which may possibly be due to 
increasing reverence for the first man; and the same tendency 
is observable elsewhere in Alexandrian literature. Philo 
speaks of Adam in the same strain as the Palestinian 
hagegadists. 

At the hands of the latter writers the endowments of the 
first man become greatly multiplied. Adam is represented as 
of enormous stature’, as physically perfect and of surpassing 
beauty, The Adam-books frequently speak of him as 
endowed with a ‘glory*, and a ‘bright nature’ is sometimes 
attributed to him*. Adam was ‘a bright angel®’ or ‘like an 
angel®.’ He was supposed to possess extraordinary powers 
of perception enabling him to observe the heavenly operations’; 


1 See pp. 134, 149. It will not be necessary in this and the following notes 
to reproduce the passages referred to; the pages of the present work on which 
they may be found will be sufficient. 

4“pp. 134, 140: 3 pp. 199, 200. Cf. p. 149. 4 p. 200. 

5 Ibid. e7p..20%. ΤΌΣ Τ21: 


ΧΙ] on the Fall 243 


the New Jerusalem was shown to him, and the heavens were 
open to his vision’. Here we perhaps have the foundation 
of the tradition which has sometimes established itself in 
Christian doctrine, that unfallen man possessed the direct 
vision of God. When Adam was first created he found all 
necessary things prepared for him, and he was supplied with 
the ministration of angels?; indeed he was even an object of 
worship to the angels*. He lived in perfect bliss‘, free from 


all grief and disease’, and possessed a nature undisturbed by 


concupiscence’. He was blessed with superhuman wisdom, 
and was the father of many arts and inventions’. 

Of Adam’s moral endowments, at the first, comparatively 
little is expressly stated. Philo seems to imply that he was 
morally neutral; the yezer doctrine, appearing in Ecclesias- 
ticus, and playing a very important part in the treatment 
accorded to the problem of sin by Pseudo-Ezra and the 
rabbinical writers, asserts that the impulse toward evil was 
divinely implanted in Adam from the first, and was the cause 
of his fall just as it is the incentive to sin in each of his 
descendants. Here then isa difference between the prevailing 
Jewish and the later Christian doctrine’. 

The duration of the unfallen state was a matter of specula- 
tion, and various views were held with regard to it. The 
Look of Jubilees states that Adam and Eve lived seven years 
before their great transgression®. More generally. the interval 
is shortened to a few days or a few hours”, in which case the 
idea of an ‘unfallen state, typical of what man’s life on earth 
was intended to be, is almost done away with. 

Still, most of the endowments which Adam had received 
at the first are expressly stated to have been taken from him 
at the Fall". Philo does not make much of the losses 
occasioned by the first transgression, barely going beyond the 


1 See p. 213, where other references on this point are collected. 
Ὄπ 140. 3 p. 200. 42D; 134. 

5 pp. 134, 213- 6 p. 213. 7 p. 150. 

8 


It may be noted that Zhe Conflict of Adam and Eve (Dillmann) says that 
Adam and Eve, in their unfallen condition, ‘‘ had not hearts turned to earthly 


things.” See p. 200. 
Pe 9. 102: 10 References are collected on p. 151- 


11 See especially the Adam -books. 
16—2 


244 Growth of Jewish doctrine — |CHAP. 


words of Genesis!; but in some of the pseudepigrapha, 
especially the Apocalypse of Baruch*, and in many passages 
of rabbinic literature’, Adam is said to have been deprived of 
his unique privileges. 


The Fall and Death. 


The view that universal physical death was the outcome 
of the Fall is general from the time of Ben Sira. It has been 
held by some, but perhaps on insufficient grounds, that this 
writer generally professes the ancient Hebrew belief that 
death was preordained for man, and natural to him. This 
question was argued in the chapter on the teaching of Eccle- 
siasticus, and the opinion was adopted that Ben Sira nowhere 
so expresses himself as necessarily to imply such a doctrine, 
but that, on the contrary, he taught that death was a con- 
sequence of the Fall. In the Alexandrian School, death is 
traced to the first sin as its cause; but it would seem to be 
ethical rather than physical death of which Pseudo-Solomon 
and Philo speak. Some writers, again, have considered that 
one of the supposed constituent sources of the (Syriac) 
Baruch-apocalypse deviates from the general view in that it 
regards the untimeliness or prematureness of death, and not 
death itself, as occasioned by Adam’s sin. This interpretation 
also seems doubtful. As for the rest of the pseudepigrapha, 
the (Noachian) interpolations of the Book of Enoch, Pseudo- 
Philo, the Apocalypse of Moses, the main portion at least of 
the Apocalypse of Baruch, and 4 Ezra all definitely assert that 
physical death was introduced and caused by the fall of our 
first parents. ‘This opinion, so general in apocalyptic writers, 
would seem, however, to have only gradually replaced the 
individualistic view in the rabbinical schools, if the slenderness 
of the information at our disposal warrants an inference on , 
the point. The belief was adopted by S. Paul from his con- 
temporaries, and so became general with Christian writers*. 


eh ee ΞΡ ΤΕ: 20.01 50. 

+ See, in connexion with the summary given above, the passages referred to 
on pp. 117f., 123f., 135 f., 161f., 189, 194, 198, 214, and in the appendix to 
Chap. IX. 


Χ] on the Fall 245 


The Tempter. 


The different representations of the tempter met with in 
the various classes of literature that have been reviewed are 
not a matter of importance to the essence of the doctrines 
of the Fall and Original Sin. Inasmuch, however, as they 
reflect some light on the history of the development of the 
Fall-story, the scattered references previously given may here 
be collected together. 

The tempter remains simply the serpent in /zdzlees}, 
though Satan is mentioned elsewhere in that book; also in 
the Apocalypse of Adam or Testament of Adam and Eve’, 
in the (Christian) Confézct of S. Thomas*, in some -rabbinical 
writings’, and in Josephus*®. Philo also never refers to a 
Satanic tempter, but he treats. the serpent in allegorical 
fashion®. 

In another series of passages the serpent is introduced 
as a means or instrument employed by the devil. This is the 
case in the Apocalypse of Moses, though elsewhere in this book 
Satan is said to have appeared to Eve in the guise of an 
angel’; in the 7veasure Cave, where the temptation is closely 
associated with the expulsion of Satan from heaven because 
of his refusal to worship the first man, and his envy thereby 
excited®; in the Conflict of Adam and Eve, where at the same 
time the tempter is somewhat strangely described as “the 
serpent that became Satan®”; in the H/zstory of the Creation 
and of the Transgression of Adam”; in the Greek Apocalypse 
of Baruch, where, however, it is Samael that puts on the 
vesture of the serpent"; in the WNarratio Zostmit™, and in 
rabbinical literature®. 

In yet other cases the serpent is identified completely with 
Satan, or replaced by him or by some corresponding evil 


ΣΟ ΤΟΣ Oe : τ ἴον, ὥρας 3 p. 233- 
Sep. 152; n.030, 6 Jbid. 

7 p. 196. 8 p. 200. 9 Lid. 
ep, 201. 

11 bp. 203. In the Slavonic text the serpent is the tempter. 


1? p- 233: 
13 δι. Pirke di R. Elieser, c. 13 (see above, p. 158). 


246 Growth of Jewish doctrine |CHAP. 


spirit. It is so in the Book of Wisdom ii. 231, which probably 
makes use of the tradition occurring in the Vzta Adae and 
elsewhere. Again, in one of the interpolations in the Look 
of Enoch, Gadreel is mentioned as the tempter of Eve’; whilst 
in the Apocalypse of Abraham it is Azazel, “like a serpent 
in form” though with hands, feet and wings, who takes the 
place of the serpent of Genesis*. It would seem that these 
various representations of the tempter are due to confusion or 
assimilation of the old Hebrew Fall-story with the (foreign ?) 
legends relating to the fall and envy of the devil, and that of 
the descent of the watchers: which last was possibly the 
result of grafting foreign notions upon the story of Gen. vi. 
I—4. 

It has been observed that the motive ascribed to the 
tempter, in bringing about the ruin of Adam and Eve, is 
almost always envy. But the sources differ very considerably 
as to how the devil’s envy was excited. According to one 
form of the tradition, Satan’s jealousy and hostility to man 
was called forth before his expulsion from heaven, and its 
occasion was his being summoned to worship Adam, along 
with the rest of the angels. This legend appears in the Vzza 
Adae*, the Treasure Cave’, the Koran% the Acts of Philip, 
the Apocalypse of Sedrach’, and, in modified form, in the 
History of the Creation and of the Transgression of Adam’. 
According to another tradition Satan only envied Adam after 
his own fall from heaven, and either on account of it or 
because of the glorious privileges and the happiness which 
Adam enjoyed in Eden. This is the form which the legend 
takes in the Apocalypse of Moses*, the Book of the Secrets of 
Enoch™, and in certain rabbinical writings". In the last-named 
branch of Jewish literature the prevailing explanation of 
Satan’s action is his desire to possess Eve. One or other 


1 See p. 124. Satan is the tempter also in the Zestament of Job, and in the 
Gospel of Nicodemus and other late apocrypha. 


2D, ESO; Ὁ Ὁ. ΤΟΝ “See Daigo. 
5 p. 200. § ed. Sale, pp. 5, 109, etc. 

? See Appendix to Chap. Ix. Papago 

a oh τοῦ: 1 CAXXXI., 566 Dp. 200: 


11 See pp. 152 ff., especially the reference to Pirke ai R. Elieser. 


x] on the Fall 247 


of these various legends as to the devil’s envy of man was 
doubtless present to the mind of the writer of the Book of 
Wisdom when he spoke of death entering into the world by 
the envy of the devil. From him, probably, the tradition 
passed on to the Christian fathers}. 

For other particular points connected with the Fall-story 
it will suffice to collect here the references to such passages 
as bear upon them, without further discussion. 


On the Trees of Paradise, see pp. 154 ff, 186f., 194, 197, 
203; and Test. of Job (Texts and Studies, V. Ὁ. \xii). 

On the Fall as connected with concupiscence, see pp. 154 ff, 
159f., 189 n. 3, 197, 208 f.: also 4 Macc. xviii. 7—8; Philo, de 
Mundi Optf. 53; Slav. Baruch, ed. Bonwetsch; and cf. 
Thackeray, of. cit. pp. 50—57. 

On the Fall as affecting Nature, see pp. 127, 150 f., 193, 197, 
e0au2ts : cf. p, 271% 


1 ¢.g, Irenaeus, 1V. 40. 3; Tertullian, De Pat. v.; Methodius, De Conviv. ; 
Gregory of Nyssa, Orat. Catech.; Augustine, De Gen. ad litt. X1. 18. 


Cle Baw etl ΝΑῚ 
S. PAUL'S DOCTRINE OF THE FALL. 


THE New Testament writings, with the exception of one 
or more of the Epistles of S. Paul, contain nothing which 
serves to throw light upon their authors’ beliefs with regard 
to the origin and mode of propagation of human sinfulness. 
The Gospels record sayings of our Lord which plainly assert 
the actual existence of evil in man and imply the absolute uni- 
versality of human sin'. So also do the apostolic writers teach*. 
But such statements as occur in the books of the New Testa- 
ment, other than those which come from the hand of S. Paul, 
in reference to the universal presence of sin in mankind are 
not decisive in favour of any of the possible theories as to the 
genesis and spread of evil; they are entirely irrelevant to this 
question. And whilst, from the fact that there is no evidence 
supplied by these New Testament statements for the existence 
amongst the evangelists and apostles of such a doctrine of 
original and inborn sin as afterwards grew up in the Christian 
Church, it cannot be inferred that they actually did not hold 
any such theory, yet, on the other hand, it must here be main- 
tained, against the assertions of other writers, that there is 
nothing in these apostolic statements, or in our Lord’s re- 
corded dealings with sinners, whether by word or deed, which 
necessarily implies that the individual’s sinfulness is due to 
anything but his own acts and the habits thereby established, 


1 “Tf ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children...” 
(Matt. vii. 11, Luke xi. 13); ‘‘ Except a man be born anew, he cannot enter into 
the Kingdom of God” (John iii. 3). 

? See, ¢.g., John ii. 25, 1 Johni, 8. 


CHAP. X1] S. Pauls Doctrine of the Fall 249 


or to his voluntary reception of the influences of sinful society 


around him. , amongst the first generation of 
Christian teachers, refers to the origi trance of sin into 
the human world,and_connects, in any way, the sinfulness of 
the race-with the-frst transgression}. 


In studying the passages in the Pauline Epistles which are 
concerned with the subject of the present investigation, it is 
necessary to disabuse our minds entirely of the later theories, 
whether of the fifth or of the sixteenth century, in terms of 
which the apostle’s statements have been usually interpreted. 
The historical method leads us to seek the meaning of 
S. Paul’s expressions and assumptions by approaching them 
from the side of the thought of his contemporaries among 
Jewish writers. S. Paul’s meaning can sometimes only be 
ascertained by studying his ideas in the light of the mental 
environment of nis day; and without such comparative study 
the most perfect linguistic scholarship may fail entirely to 
detect the real content of the apostle’s speech. This is not, of 
course, to say that there is one, and one only, key to the 
apostle’s thought; he is far too creative and original a thinker 
to be wholly explicable in terms of the teaching of his con- 
temporaries, or of the sources of tradition from which he 
| sometimes undoubtedly drew. But such aids to exegesis are 
certainly indispensable; sometimes their testimony is supreme 
and decisive. 

It is partly with a view to elucidating S. Paul’s teaching 
with regard to the Fall and its consequences that the passages 
| bearing upon this subject in the Jewish apocalyptic literature 
were so exhaustively collected in foregoing chapters. It is 
unfortunate that, in the present state of studies connected 
with the earlier rabbinic writings, much less light can be thrown 
upon this side of Jewish thought at the time of S. Paul; the 
literature which we possess is too late to admit of its being 
used as embodying contemporary teaching, at least for the 
most part, unless the age of its contents be tested by reference 


1 The Apocalypse contains (eschatological) allusions to the tree of life, ii. 7, 
xxii. 2, 14, and to the ‘old serpent,’ xii. g (on which see above, p. 43, n. 2), but 
does not deal with the Fall and its consequences. 


a 


250 S. Pauls Doctrine [CHAP. 


to such pseudepigraphic writings as are of indisputable 
antiquity. 

There is no doubt that S. Paul’s mind was deeply in- 
fluenced by his rabbinical training. His attitude towards the 
Old Testament Scriptures, his ideas of the nature of their 
inspiration, his method of using them for proofs and of in- 
terpreting them, his resort to allegory and haggada, all reveal 


‘the apostle’s early environment. And, more than this, it is 


beyond doubt that he retained a considerable amount of 
Jewish, as distinguished from Old Testament, theology. His 
ideas, for instance, of the first man, the temptation of Eve, 
the Fall and its results, were derived, as will presently be 
seen, from the Jewish schools. 

With regard to Alexandrian or Hellenic influences there 
is much less evidence. He would certainly seem to have 
studied the Book of Wisdom, and indeed to have once at 
least reproduced in some degree its thought and language. 
He does not appear, however, to have been indebted to it for 
any important doctrine; still less can it be shown that he was 
influenced by Philo. Of the parallels enumerated by Siegfried, 
none is sufficient to establish direct contact with the Alex- 
andrian’s writings. he st important is the resemblance 


between the Pauline doctrine of the first and the last Adam 


borrowing. The atternpt to represent 5. Paul’s theology as 
a compound of Hellenism and Pharisaism has been carried by 
some writers much too far’, especially in the case of the 
apostle’s doctrine of Sin, which was largely the outcome of his 
awn moral and spiritual experience. ΣΌΣ ὶ 

It is chiefly in the sphere οἵ haggada that S. Paul’s treat- 
ment of the Fall-story reveals the influence of rabbinical, or 
rather Jewish, speculation. He utilises several ideas which 
were the common property of Jewish writers of his day, and 


1 On the other hand we have no parallel in axcien¢ rabbinical literature. For 
similar ideas in later writings see Taylor, Sayzzgs of the Jewish Fathers, 2nd ed., 
p. 56. See also Thackeray, of. czt., p. 40 ff. 

3 Cf. Bruce, S. Pauls Conception of Christianity, p. 132 f.,and 217 f. Perhaps 
Prof. Bruce’s protest is a little exaggerated in the other direction. 


x1] of the Fall 251 


his treatment of Old Testament history is not always identical 
with exact exegesis. In the first place, S. Paul’s conception 
of the first man is to some extent an ideal construction. 
His Adam is a conceptual type, perhaps shaped to a slight 


extent by the dialectical exigencies of the occasion, and 
formed by fusing the first man of Gen. iii. with the undiffer- 
entiated Adam, oF generic man, of Gen ii., who was no longer, 
strictly speaking, the sum of the race at the moment of his 
transgression’. But this is too small a point to be insisted 
upon without pedantry. 

Secondly, the notion that Eve alone was directly tempted 
by the serpent or Satan, and the belief that she was tempted 
to unchastity, appear to have been shared by S. Paul along 
with the apocalyptic, and perhaps rabbinic, writers of that 
period. If this be so,—and the matter cannot be argued 
here*—we have very direct testimony to S. Paul’s acceptance 
of some of the popular Jewish speculations as to the Fall. 


Again, the narrative of Genesis, if it has here been rightly 


understood, does not teach that Adam became mortal because | 


of his transgression, nor-that_his_trespass—was_the_cause of 
death to his descendants: much less does it imply that. the 


first sin_made all men sinners, in any sense. Both physical 
and spiritual death, -or_at least-spiritual consequences of some 


kind, are_attributed, however, as has dy been shown, to to 
Adam’s sin in early Jewish literature; and it is such Jewish 
teaching, w which the apostle assumes, and which he supposes 


connexion. berweens Adam- Pees Tace-as- τ and 
death. ; 

There are not many passages in the Pauline Epistles 
which bear, even indirectly, on the fall of Adam and its conse- 
quences for mankind. By far the most important is Romans 
v. I2—2I, where the relation of Adam’s sin to the race is 
described in contrast with the effects which flow from the 
redemptive work of Christ. The brief allusion to the nature 


1 Cf. Beyschlag, WV. 7. Theology, E.T. vol. 11. p. 62. 

Ξ The reader is once more referred to the discussion of this question in 
Mr Thackeray’s work, Zhe relation of S. Paul to contemporary Jewish Thought, 
p. 50 ff. 


252 S. Paul's Doctrine | CHAP. 


of the first Adam_as contrasted with that of the last_Adam, in 


I Cor. xv. 45 ff. is not_relevant to the subject, because_its 
‘context is not ‘concerned. _with the problem of Sin. The 
| account of the immanence of sin in ‘the flesh,’ the principal 
seat of sinful promptings, contained in: “Rom. Vil. 725, with 
which scattered verses in Rom. viii. and Gal. v. are to be 
associated, will call for some consideration, because it touches 


“upon_the psychological side _of the_problem—of_the—origin 
of sin, as distinguished_from_the historical ας. which, is 


broug ht before us in Rom. v. τ π ll “by 
which has generally 


nature children of wrath,’ in Eph. i 
been expoun the past ast i ing a doctrine of Original 


‘Sin, ‘must be briefly noticed. The discussion of human sinful- 
ness contained in the early chapters of the Epistle tq the 
Romans need not be included, inasmuch as it only aims_at 
establishing empirically, and by appeal to Scripture, the 
observed” pace of the universality of actual sin, without en- 
deavouring to explain. the absoluteness of such univ ersality by 
any theory or doctrine, 

~~Tt must be borne in mind that although, in the passages 
about to be discussed, S. Paul treats of the nature of man, of 
his inherent sinfulness, of the historical entrance of sin into 
the human race, and of certain consequences which have 
followed from that event, he does so in each case somewhat 
incidentally. 

He does not attempt to supply exhaustive or systematic 
instruction with regard to these subjects, after the manner of 
the theologian who discusses them for their own sake. He 
lays down no dogma, either as to the exact nature, or as 
to the cause, of human_ sinfulness as a subjective state. Sin 
and the Fall are spoken of only in so far as they are involved 
in the apostle’s great doctrine of justification. Both in 
Rom. v. 12)ff. and in 1 Cor. xv.45 ff Adam" 1s) made? the 
subject of passing consideration only in order to illustrate 
the significance of Christ, and the comprehensiveness of His 
redemptive work. 

And finally, the passages which disclose S. Paul’s teaching 
on such subjects as human nature, Sin and the Fall, do not 
suggest that he had completely developed the various lines of 


ΧΙ] of the Fall 253 


thought which they contain into a unified and coherent 
system. The doctrine of each of these passages is incomplete 
in itself, and their mutual independence is conspicuous. 

The passage Rom. v. 12—21!1 may be considered first. 

These verses are regarded as constituting one of the most 
difficult passages in the Bible. The strain which they put 
upon the exegete’s powers does not arise from the profundity 
of the subject, nor from the intricacy of the argument, as is 
the case elsewhere in the Epistles of S. Paul. It arises simply 
from the fact that the indefinite language of the apostle 
necessarily appears ambiguous ‘to. generations which have 
attempted ‘to advance to precise and definitely formulated 
views on the subject upon which he touches but incidentally. 
To ascertain exactly what S. Paul meant with regard to the 
connexion between Adam’s transgression and the universal 
prevalence of sinfulness and death, in terms of the alternative 
theories developed in the course of subsequent speculation, 
is perhaps beyond the limits of possibility. Certainly to 
assume that it is not so would be to prejudge a question as 
yet undecided, and therefore possibly to commit an offence 
against historical method. We must at least be careful not 
to read into S. Paul’s language more than it can legitimately 
bear, and be prepared to believe, if the facts warrant it, that 
in all probability none of the several forms of the doctrine 
of Original Sin which, in the Christian Church, only became 
differentiated in course of time, was ever distinctly present 
to the apostle’s mind. 

The several interpretations of the passage in question may 
be mentioned, and their inherent advantages and disadvan- 
tages briefly pointed out; but as to what S. Paul himself 
meant by his statements we can perhaps only hope to form 
a reasonable conviction when we have apprehended certain 
general characteristics of his thought, and have traced the 
relation of his teaching to ideas current in his day’. 


1 Perhaps the fullest discussion of the various interpretations of this passage 
will be found in Lange’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (Schaff’s ed. | 
E.T.). The treatises of German writers such as Pfleiderer, Hausrath, Weizsicker, | 
and Beyschlag, on Pauline or New Testament theology, should also be consulted, 
along with the perhaps more reliable works of Bruce and Stevens on Pauline 
theology, and the Commentary of Sanday and Headlam. 


f 
254 S. Paul's Doctrine [CHAP. 


It is not of much importance to ascertain here whether 
S. Paul, in Rom. v. 12 ff, uses θάνατος exclusively in the 
sense of physical death, as is maintained by most writers’, 
or whether, after the example of the Book of Wisdom, and 
as in other places in his own Epistles, the word is endowed 
also with an ethical meaning. The latter view has been 
maintained by Toy, Beyschlag and others, but perhaps upon 
no very convincing grounds. In any case the apostle assumes, 
as well known, that death is the consequence of Adam’s sin ; 
and in doing so he is in accordance with the general tendency 
amongst contemporary pseudepigraphic writers, though, so 
far as the scanty light enables us to see, not with that which 
was most probably the more prevalent view in the rabbinical 
schools of the time. 

Much more important is the relation of the Fall to human 
sinfulness ; and on this S. Paul speaks but briefly, indefinitely 
and incidentally. He is not concerned expressly with insisting 
on the solidarity of mankind or with controverting indivi- 
dualism. He is expounding, primarily, the effects of Christ's 
redemptive work for all; and in order to do so he falls b falls back 


upon the familiar idea ἘΠΕ Adam’s sin affected all, a: as an 


analogy. In 80. far as the origin of sin is alluded to in this 
passage, 1: 15} 105 historical, not its psychological, origin. The 
question of the existence of evil before its appearance in man 
is wholly excluded. It_is the historical beginning of sinful 
action in mankind to which 5. Paul refers, apart from δὴν 


metaphysical | or psychological questions underlying | it; and 


physically, sth the entrance of Sin as _a power into the human 
Ww orld. The conc: concrete te fact of 1 the beginning. of_sin is described 
_under the figure of the entrance of f Sin. And the apostle then 
‘proceeds to allude to the consequences of this event for the 
race derived from Adam. 
Sin, then, in this section of the Epistle, is conceived as. a 
transcendent, objective Ὁ power, external to man, rather than < as 


an inward or subjective sti state, The word stands for a hypo- 
statised abstraction, the common quality belonging to all 
pe OT Oe eas 


OO 
1 Kabisch, Lschatologie d. Paulus, S. 93f.; Lipsius, Handkommentar sum 
N.T. iii. 2 loc. ; Bruce, of. czt., p. 136; Sanday and Headlam, 272 doc. 


a. | of the Fall 255 


nine of evil, w at er personal or impersonal. “aE aE 
this external ruling- power, ὉΠ 15 represented elsewhere as 
immanent in the fleshy nature of man, in which it has taken 
up its abode. Here too we have a figure of speech, de- 
scriptive of practical experience and not_expressing anthro- 
pological doctrine. This immanent sin-power is conceived 
as ‘deceiving’, and as playing the 7vdé/e of the serpent 
of Eden. It produces sin: the evil which a man does is \ 
accomplished by Sin in opposition to his own will? Sin / 
is thus sharply differentiated here from the sinner; it is \ 
something distinct from him and from his ‘flesh’ in which 
it is conceived as dwelling. It is “a power which makes 
both the will and the impulses subservient to it.” But 
S. Paul nowhere makes this personified abstraction into a 
real or objective existence; much less does he identify it 
with the personal Satan*. He gives us, therefore, no meta- ἡ 
physical doctrine of sin. 

But we return to the passage in Rom. v. before us. 

Sin “entered into the world’,” S. Paul says, “by one man, 
and death through sin; and so,” ze. through the sin of one 
and through the causal connexion just asserted to exist 
between sin and death, “death made its way to all men 
because all sinned” (kai οὕτως εἰς πάντας ἀνθρώπους ὁ θάνατος 
διῆλθεν, ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον). The difficulty of the passage 
centres in this, its first verse; but its purport cannot be 
apprehended until these words be taken in connexion with 
verses 18 and 19, in which the thought, long delayed by 
parentheses, at last completes itself by means of an anaco- 
luthon. This difficulty consists in the ambiguity of the 
words ‘all sinned,’ their connexion with ‘so’ (οὕτως), and any 


relation of the whole verse to those which immediately follow. 
It is assumed here that ‘because’ is_ the ory 
1 Rom. vii. 11. 
2 Jbid. verse 17. 

3 Sanday and Headlam, op. cit. (1898) p. 145, think that S. Paul would 
probably have made this identification if the question had been pressed upon him. 
But are there any passages in which the apostle might have written Satan for Sin, 
without altering his meaning ? 

4 The same phrase is used in Wisdom, and was perhaps a common formula. 


[ 


i 
i 


qe 


| 


256 S. Pauls Doctrine [CHAP. 


rendering of ἐφ᾽ @; this is now very generally, though not 


quite universally, recognised’, _ 
the rendering of 5. Augustine. and _ the Vulgate, which 
would regard ἐφ᾽ as grammatically equivalent to in quo, is 


abandoned. It does not follow from this, however, that the 
sense which would be obtained by such translation is incom- 


patible with the language of the verse, as Pfleiderer asserts 
in the second edition of his Paulintsmus. The meaning 
expressed in the well-known words of Bengel “omnes pecca- 
runt, Adamo Rene ” and vigorously defended in the first 


supplying ἐν ἐν 07 Τρ TST STI We are thus led to 
one of the possible interpretations of the verse. 

Before comparing’ the chief interpretations which have 
been put upon this passage, however, it may be well to point 
out that its exegesis involves an answer to two distinct 


questions. In th place, does S. Paul imply that death 


;was brought upon all men because they all sinned—in some 


sense—when Adam sinned, or does he mean that all men die 
because they all sinned separately and personally? In other 


‘words, is it race-solidarity to which the apostle appeals in 


order to account for universal death, or is it that he maintains 
what is called an individualistic theory of the connexion 
between sin and death Ὁ 

In the gecon place, supposing the first of these Alera 
views to be~adopted, as will be the case here, the question 
arises, what is the mediating fact between Adam’s sin on the 
one hand and the individual’s sin and death on the other? Is 
it simply God’s appointment; or the seminal existence in 
‘Adam of his posterity; or the representation of them by him ; 
lor their existence in him, the sum of humanity, in the sense 
of S. Augustine and mediaeval realism; or inheritance of a 
sinful state induced by the Fall; or anything else which may 
have been suggested? The he two questions. (i) whether S. Paul 
teaches that the race were made sinners when Adam sinned, 
(ii) in what way Adam’s sin and his -posterity’s sinfulness are 
connected, are quite distinct ; and the second cannot arise 


1 For other renderings, generally discarded as ungrammatical, see the Com- 
mentary of Lange and that of Sanday and Headlam. 


—. 


X1] of the fall 257 


until the first has been settled in one of the two ways 
possible. 

With regard to the former of these questions there is still 
a hopeless difference of opinion amongst authorities, though 
perhaps the balance of opinion inclines to the view which we 
here venture to adopt, according to which the apostle teaches 
some form or other of the doctrine of Original Sin, in the 
broadest sense of that phrase, some connexion, that is, 
between human sinfulness and death and the primary trans- 
gression of Adam. There is certainly much to be said in 
favour of such a view. 

In the first place, the whole illustration—and the passage 
relating to Adam is introduced, it must be repeated, solely 
as an illustration or analogy—would seem to lose its point 
if, after all, universal death were due to the actual sins of every 
single individual. [t is the effect of the “one man’s” sin on 
the_whole race which is obviously the central point of the 
analogy between Adam and Christ. ean this interpretation 
harmonises best with the tense of npaptov', and with the 
sense of ἁμαρτία in the present passage. The thought of 
personal, individual sin is quite foreign to the context. 
Further support is derived from the Apostle’s other saying, 
“In Adam all die.” But perhaps the most crucial test of 
the truth of this interpretation, as against its rival, is furnished 
by the two verses which immediately follow. 

The view which regards the sin of all as connected in 
v. 12 with the sin of Adam not only harmonises with, but 
finds support in, the thought which is there expressed. Ac- 
cording to these verses, the existence of actual sin during the 
interval between Adam and Moses is recognised, but is 
declared to have been insufficient to account for the universal 
prevalence of death at that time; for without a law to make 
sin guilty, such sin could not have been imputed to the 
sinners, and still less could it therefore have been visited with 
the punishment of death. The inference is that, for this 
particular period of history, the pre-Mosaic, death was due to 


1 Stevens refers to 2 Cor. v. 15, Rom. iii. 23, Col. iii. 1, etc. for parallel 
usage of the Aorist by S. Paul. 


8 17 


258 S. Paul's Doctrine [ CHAP. 


some other cause than the personal sins of individuals ; and 
this seems to be only reconcileable with the statement that 
death passed to all “ because all sinned,” if we take those 
words to refer to sin regarded as committed once and for all 
by Adam. 
vind, on the other hand, there are difficulties in the way of 
interpreting ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον 85. referring to the actual or 
ersonal sins of individuals. Tee. statement, as has often 
been pointed out, would-not be strictly true; there is the 


very obvious exception of all infants. The verses last alluded .- 


to assert that for one period of human history death was not, 
and could not be, thus due to actual or individual sin. And 
finally, on such an interpretation the analogy between the 
first and the second Adam would be partially destroyed. For 
these reasons it_would seem_ distinctly safer to conclude that, 
5. Paul intended to imply, that there was.some kind of con- 
nexion, other than that of mere order in a series, between the 
fall of Adam and the sin of éach of his descendants. 

There is a modified form, however, ofthe. individualistic 


interpretation | of Romans ν. 12, which deserves to be men- 


ΟῚ 


‘Sin ‘aust ‘entered into the ati through Ada 5 ; fall, aiid SO 
gained a footing whence to extend its sway over mankind ; 
“but that it actually only acquired its dominion in individual 
men by means of their voluntary invitation or cooperation. 
Thus the ruin of the race would not have been brought about 
had not Adam by his fall admitted sin into the world; nor 
yet would Adam’s transgression have affected any but himself 
had not his descendants individually fallen in a similar way, 
thereby appropriating to themselves Adam’s condemnation. 
This view is adopted by Mr Thackeray, who is inclined to 
think that S. Paul reproduces in Romans v. 12 ff. the two 
antithetic views held by Jewish writers with regard to the 
connexion between universal death and the Fall. 

It is certainly the case that, in some of the apocalyptic 
books approximately contemporaneous with the writings of 
S. Paul, we meet with the assertion that death was decreed 


Lr OP. C16.) Deas 


XI] ἌΡ Μ25 ΧΡ 259 


against the race because of Adam’s sin, and side by side with 
this the (apparently) conflicting statement that each individual 
is responsible for his own ruin, or, as Pseudo-Baruch expresses 
‘it, thatevery man is “the Adam of his own soul.” .. We know, 
moreover, that it was not uncommon for Rabbis to place two 
antithetical propositions, such as affirmations of predestination 
and free will, side by side without reconciliation, as the effective 
solution of the whole problem. And Weber? implies that the 
teaching of the Synagogue with regard to the connexion 
between the Fall, sin and death, was capable of being summed 
up in this way. Such a conclusion, however, is not safe in the 
absence of proof that the two beliefs which he combines into 
one were really held together, and were not, as there is some 
reason to suspect, rather the expressions of the doctrine of 
different schools, if not of different periods. Still, the insist- 
ence of apocalyptic writers, who admit the ruin caused by 
Adam, upon the responsibility of the individual, together 
with the probability that in S. Paul’s day the doctrine “no 
death without (individual) sin” was dominant in the rabbinical 
schools, certainly tends somewhat to diminish the confidence 
with which we maintain that the Apostle meant to imply, in 
this difficult passage, that human death and sin were solely 
due to Adam’s primary transgression. 

These considerations, however, do not appear to have very 
considerable weight against the exegesis previously supported. 
However much they suggest that the individualistic theory 
was common in S. Paul’s time, the interpretation of the verse 
before us to which they point seems incompatible with the 
meaning of those which follow: verses which present a diffi- 
culty in the way of attributing any form of the individualistic 
theory of the cause of death to S. Paul. In them the Apostle 
explicitly refers to a period during which death was γοζ due 
to the conscious sins of individuals, or to their deliberate 
cooperation in perpetuating the state initiated by Adam, and 
during which, therefore, Adam’s trespass must alone have 
been the cause for which men died. 

Assuming, therefore, that S. Paul regarded the Fall as 


Lope Chis SOGay ΠῚ 
17—2 


260 S. Pauls Doctrine [ CHAP. 


something having a far more momentous result for humanity 
than that it merely admitted the sin-power into the world but 
otherwise left men practically as Adam himself was at the 
first, We may pass on to enumerate the several kinds of 
‘original sin’ which the Apostle has been considered to teach. 
——----——— First may be mentioned the interpretation, or series of 
interpretations, obtained by assuming that when S. Paul 
wrote “for that all sinned,” he mentally supplied “in Adam.” 
These omitted words are demanded, so many commentators 
have urged, in order to define the Apostle’s meaning in a ᾿ 
sense compatible with the purport of the passage as a whole. 
The adoption of them certainly makes S. Paul’s meaning 
plain, and gives a consistency to the whole passage which 
otherwise we have to search for, as it seems to us, in vain. It 
is true that the two words thus supplied are rather important 
ones to have been omitted. .Many will doubtless think, with 
Dr Sanday and Mr Headlam!}, that if 5. Paul had the words 
in mind he probably would have written them, since so much 
hangs upon them. Nor may we suppose, as a way out of 
the difficulty, that the thought thus unexpressed was so 
familiar to the writer, and regarded by him as so universally 
known an assumption, that it scarcely required explicit state- 
ment. The arguimentum e silentio is indeed always precarious; 
but so far as we know, no authentic instance has been found 
of the occurrence, in Jewish literature at all near to the age 
of S. Paul, of the conception that Adam constituted the 
whole race, or that the race potentially existed in him, and 
sinned in and with him. That such an idea existed amongst 
the Jews of that time has indeed frequently been asserted by 
theologians of note. References, however, are usually not 
given; and in the rare cases in which they have been offered 
they have not borne the simple ordeal of verification. Cabba- 
listic literature, no doubt, supplies abundance of examples of 
the use of this conception; but that is, of course, quite useless 
as a guide to the views of writers in the first century. But 
though the objection raised against Bengel’s exegesis of our 
passage cannot be refuted on this ground, it can perhaps be 


1 op. cit., tn loc. 


XI] of the Fall 201 


met upon another. For it is quite plain that a mental inter- 
polation of some kind is necessary, if we are to extract any 
definite meaning at all from S. Paul’s language; and it may 
be observed that the context, with its unfinished original con- 
struction, testifies that the writers thought was here out- 
stripping his care to give it accurate definition. And failing 
the words ‘in Adam,’ to what alternative interpolation must 
we have recourse? That suggested by Dr Sanday and 
Mr Headlam, from whose weighty opinion it is here ventured 
to diverge, is an equally important element to be ‘supplied.’ 
Indeed it may be asked whether the idea of inherited sinful- 
ness, as the cause of death to all who came between Adam 
and Moses, does not call at least as loudly for explicit 
mention, if S. Paul’s full meaning be expressible in terms of 
it, as that signified by Bengel’s addition of ‘in Adam’? 
Would it not be equally novel to the reader, so far as our 
knowledge of the thought of that age goes, and more remote 
from the actual language of the verse and its context? 

It is more probable then, if we may commit ourselves to 
an opinion on so difficult and highly disputed a point, that 
S. Paul meant that it was in Adam that all men sinned, and 
so brought death upon themselves. It may further be in- 
quired, though again the inquiry will prove difficult to answer, 
in what sense the Apostle regarded the race as one with Adam, 
or as included in him. 

There is first the possibility that his form of thought was 
that of the writer of the- Epistle to the Hebrews, where he 
speaks of Levi as existing in the loins of Abraham when the 
patriarch met Melchisedek, and therefore as paying tithe to 
him in Abraham’. This idea of seminal existence and ante- 
natal participation in an ancestor's act, being used by a writer 
of the same period, may have been in S. Paul’s mind, and 
have furnished him with an expedient by which to make 
Adam’s trespass the sin of all his posterity likewise. If it 
was a common notion, it does not seem to have frequently 


1 Heb. vii. 9, 10. This passage appears to have been comparatively seldom 
cited in connexion with Rom. v. 12. Biesenthal calls attention to it, in relation 
to 5. Paul’s argument, in his Das Trostschretben d. Apostels Paulus an die 
Hebraer, in loc. 


262 S. Pauls Doctrine [CHAP. 


found expression in literature. We find it actually used by 
Origen’ to explain 5. Paul’s thought, long before 5. Augustine 
borrowed, from a kind of philosophical realism, a different 
conception to serve the same purpose. 

This last is the second of the various ways in which the 
sinning of the race in Adam may have been conceived by 
S. Paul. The realism “which makes human nature a certain 
guantum of being and treats descent from Adam as a division 
of this mass of human nature into parts®” is, however, remote 
from S. Paul’s manner of thought. The writer of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews was somewhat of a Platonist; but this can 
hardly be asserted of S. Paul. 

Much more probable, in the opinion of the present writer, 
is the suggestion that, in his identification of the race and 
Adam, S. Paul was using a form of thought occurring by no 
means exclusively in the particular verse of his writings with 
which we are here concerned. Stevens has appropriately 
named it ‘mystical realism.’ “It is characteristic of Paul’s 
mind,” says this writer, “to conceive religious truth under 
forms which are determined by personal relationship. These 
relations, especially the two just specified (that of unregenerate 
humanity to Adam, and of spiritual humanity to Christ), may 
be termed sxzystical in the sense of being unique, vital and 
inscrutable; they are read in the sense that sinful humanity is 
conceived as being actually present and participent in Adam’s 
sin..... This mystical realism is a style of thought, a rhetorical 
mode; it is not a philosophy: the realism is only figurative. 
S. Paul] identifies the race, as sinners, with Adam in the same 
sense that he identifies the believer with Christ. “The moral 
deflement of man is represented as contracted in and with 
the sin of Adam*.” 

The sins of all mankind are referred by the Apostle to the 
first sin, the root of all, not in the sense that all mankind had 
actual participation in that sin; he rather means that all 


1 See below, Chap. XII. ; 

* Stevens, 7he Pauline Theology, p. 136. The treatment of Rom. v. 12 ff. in 
this work may be especially commended to the student’s notice. 

3 op. cit., Ὁ. 32 ff., and elsewhere. 

4 op. cit., p. 37. The italics are the present writer's. 


ΧΙ] of the Fall 263 


sinned in Adam in the same sense that he speaks of believers 
as being crucified to the world, and having died to sin, when 
Christ died upon the Cross. Or, again, just as the believer’s 
renewal is conceived by S. Paul as wrought in advance, though 
of course he did not suppose it actually to be so wrought, so 
also does he conceive the consequences of Adam’s sin as having 
been wrought simultaneously with it? 

This attractive interpretation of 5. Paul’s meaning has the 
great virtue of explaining his words, which involve so many 
difficulties when taken, as they generally have been, with too 
much literalness, as only a particular case of a mode of speech 
which is characteristic of the apostle. And so long as it is 
not so far pressed as to lose sight of the undeniable connexion 
between the apostle’s teaching and the somewhat indefinite 
belief which he inherited from Jewish doctors as to the con- 
nexion between the Fall and human sin and death, it would 
seem to supply the best key to the thought of this difficult 
passage. 

The more weight there is in the reasons which have been 
advanced for regarding S. Paul as implying the doctrine that 
all sinned in Adam, and the particular form of that doctrine 
which was last described, the less support can be given here 
to the altogether different view, that the apostle held, implicit 
and unexpressed, the idea of a corruption of human nature 
caused once and for all by Adam's transgression and inherited 
by each generation descended from him, and that he so con- 
nected the first entrance of sin through the one man with the 
sinfulness of all men. 

Such an interpretation is not’to be rejected merely because 
ἥμαρτον cannot grammatically be rendered vitiati. sunt or 
‘became sinful.’ But it has several disadvantages as compared 
with the view which has been previously discussed. It is out 
of harmony with the objective sense in which ἁμαρτία is used 
throughout the passage, and which requires a more mystical 
(some would say a more forensic) sense for the expression 
“were constituted sinners” in verse 19. The interpretation 
does not so well preserve the analogy which is being drawn 


‘ 


1 op. cits, Pp. 130. 


264 S. Paul's Doctrine [ CHAP. 


between Adam and Christ. It creates a ¢ertium guid between 
Adam and the death of his posterity which is not suggested 
by the context, and which is omitted each time the relation 
of Adam to the race is mentioned ; for the ‘trespass of one’ 
is several times zszmediately connected with the cause of 
human death. Again, it is largely open to the main objection 
lying against the view which takes ἥμαρτον to refer to the 
actual and personal sins of individuals. For inherited sinful 
tendencies would still leave room for personal responsibility, 
and thus universal death would be caused by universal actual 
sin, a thought precluded in the 13th and 14th verses. The 
view, in fact, seems to be a compromise between that which 
is based on the interpolation of ἐν "Aéap, and that which has 
been designated individualistic. It certainly does not grow 
necessarily, or even naturally, out of the context itself. In so 
far as it is imported from elsewhere in S. Paul’s Epistles, its 
further refutation will be involved in the discussion of such 
passages in the apostle’s writings as are assumed to be its 
source. Meanwhile it may be further remarked that sin 
whose guilt is diminished by the fact that a bias or tendency 
towards sinfulness is of necessity inherited is too nearly on 
the same moral level with sin whose guilt is diminished by 
ignorance Or non-possession of a moral law (as in the pre- 
Mosaic period) for the one to be considered the cause of 
death while the other is expressly ruled out as insufficient. 
If S. Paul meant that death passed to all because all were, by 
heredity, made personally sinful, it is strange that he should 
have chosen to write ἐφ᾽ 6 πάντες ἥμαρτον. The Aorist aptly 
describes an act of sin accomplished once and for all in Adam, 
or the ‘mystical’ reference of the sins of mankind back to 
their root as if already then actually committed ; it is hardly 
suitable to describe the past, present and future sinning of 
men by reason of their inheritance of a sinful tendency from 
their first father. 

It has already been hinted that this interpretation of 
S. Paul’s statements does not receive external support as a 
current doctrine which S. Paul might be supposed to derive 
from his contemporaries. The only parallels adduced by 
Sanday and Headlam from approximately contemporary lite- 


XI] of the Fall 205 


rature are the passages of 4 Ezra relating to the cor malgnum. 
But the cor malignum is certainly the yezer hara of the Rabbis, 
regarded by Pseudo-Ezra, as well as by talmudic writers, as 
inherent in Adam from the first, and as the cause, not the 
consequence, of his fall. S. Paul, curiously enough, nowhere 
appears to make use of the current doctrine of the evil yezer'; 
certainly not in connexion with the Fall. There would seem 
to be no evidence that S. Paul held, even in germ, the doctrine 
of an inherited corruption derived from Adam. 

Yet another theory of Original Sin which has been attri- 
buted to S. Paul remains to be mentioned. He has been 
taken to imply that all Adam’s race have been “constituted 
sinners” by imputation; that they have passed into a judicial 
relation with God such as may be called a state of condemna- 
tion. The mediating fact between Adam’s sin and all men 
being sinners would in this case simply be God’s appointment. 

The injustice attributed to the Almighty by such a view 
appears, at first sight, to be somewhat mitigated in the kindred 
‘federal’ theory, according to which mankind is involved in 
the punishment of Adam because he was their representative 
in a covenant relation with God. In other words, men sinned 
in Adam not pre-natally, or as potentially contained in him, 
but in a representative or putative manner. They are re- 
garded and treated by God as sinners because the act of 
Adam, as representative of the race, bound them also. If 
S. Paul intended his argument to carry this implication, we 
should then find the nearest parallel to his meaning in the 
passage before us in 2 Cor. v. 14, “one died for all, therefore 
all died,” interpreted in terms of the same literalism which 
lies at the root of the federal theology; or else in the arbitrary 
visitation of parents’ sins upon their children, such as was 
ascribed to Jehovah in the Old Testament and by the popular 
Jewish belief of S. Paul's time (cf. S. John ix. 2). This view, 
which of course would not be mentioned here unless it had 
been seriously intended for exegesis of S. Paul’s statements, 
is perhaps often held side by side with that of potential sin 
in Adam, and undistinguished from it. Thus Gifford? in 


1 See below, p. 271. 
2 Epistle to the Romans, p. 117. 


266 S. Pauls Doctrine [CHAP. 


defending what is a combination of these two different theo- 
ries, quotes with approval a passage from Bishop Bull, wherein 
Adam is represented as one party to a covenant of life which 
his sin made void,‘not only for himself, but also for his pos- 
terity, so that all his sons, as such, are quite shut out from 
any promise of immortality: a passage, that is, in which the 
punishment of Adam’s descendants is not ascribed to their 
inherited depravity, nor to their actual or fictitious participa- 
tion in their first father’s trespass, but simply to the arbitrary 
visitation of one individual’s sin upon others not regarded as 
in any sense taking part in it. 

S. Paul’s language in the latter portion of the section of 
Romans v. which has been discussed above, where a relation 
of wrath between God and man is spoken of as if set up once 
and for all, so that all men were “constituted sinners” as it 
were in anticipation of their actual sinfulness, has led certain 
recent scholars to consider that the apostle here entertained 
not merely an objective, but even a forensic or legalistic, con- 
ception of sin’. One is prevented from subscribing to such 
an opinion by the reflection that, in his treatment of sin in 
general, S. Paul was no legalist, and that therefore he could 
hardly become one upon occasion. Moreover, another inter- 
pretation of his language lies to hand, as has been seen, which 
is both more charitable to the apostle and more reconcilable 
with his general doctrine and mode of thought. An inter- 
pretation of the passage before us, therefore, based upon the 
supposition that sin is there spoken of purely from the forensic 
point of view, has no peculiar advantage of its own, though it 
has its own obvious demerits. And it is only by violence that 
ἥμαρτον can be made to mean “became legally guilty.” 

Yet other interpretations, based upon renderings of ἐφ᾽ ᾧ 
which grammarians will not allow, will be found enumerated 
in the commentaries ; but they need not be reproduced here. 
It is, of course, quite impossible to arrive at objective certainty 
as to what S. Paul’s exact meaning was. But of those views 
which have now been discussed, that which regards S. Paul as 
having clothed the current notion of Adam as the cause of 


1 See Pfleiderer, Paulinism (E.T.), rst ed. vol. 1. p. 43 ff.; Weizsacker, Zhe 
Apostolic Age, E.T. vol. 1. p. 148 ff.; Lipsius, of. czt., 122 loc. 


XT] of the Fall 267 


human death, and the root of human sin, in the language of 
his peculiar ‘mystical realism, would seem to be the best 
grounded. If this be so, his doctrine of the Fall must be 
regarded as widely different from that which was destined to 
become general in the Christian Church. 

But other passages of his writings still require consideration. 

The verses which have already been discussed certainly 
cannot be said xecessarily to contain the doctrine of inherited 
inborn taint of sin. They connect mankind’s sinfulness with 
the Fall, but in some entirely undefined way. But it has 
sometimes been urged that although the doctrine of trans- 
mitted depravity cannot be extracted from the fifth chapter 
of the Epistle to the Romans alone, it is yet forced upon 
us when that chapter is read in the light of the passage 


Rome > Here the apostle is supposed to offer teaching 


as to the ps chaloainn| or rigin of sin, as distinguished from the 


historical origin on which he touches in the former chapter. 


It must be stated at the outset that the task of eliciting a 
psychology of sin from 5S. Paul’s writings is rendered difficult 
by the fact that he expresses himself in language that is 
largely popular, figurative and practical, and which makes no 
pretension to scientific exactness. And the accurate state- 
ment by us of the content of his thought is made the more 
arduous by reason of the inadequacy, as an instrument for 
precision of expression, of the phraseology still employed in 
the theological treatment of the subject of sin. Some of its 
ordinary words are question-begging in regard to problems 
which emerge when we attempt a rigorous analysis of our 
familiar traditional conceptions. This, however, is not the op- 
portunity for introducing a reformed vocabulary, and S. Paul’s 
meaning must be presented in terms such as lie to hand’. 

S. Paul speaks of sin existing in a man as ‘dead’ before © 
the knowledge of the law comes to call it forth into action 
and to constitute him guilty; yet, strictly speaking, sin that 
exists prior to law and will-determination is not sin at all. 
Again, if σὰρξ ἁμαρτίας", παθήματα τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν", are to be 


1 These questions have been dealt with in the author’s work, Zhe Ovigin and 
Propagation of Sin, pp. 160 ff. 
2 Rom. viii. 3. eEViliee: 


268 S. Paul's Doctrine [ CHAP. 


translated ‘sinful flesh, ‘sinful passions,’ it must be borne in 
mind that the word ‘sinful’ in these expressions is used 
rhetorically, as other sides of the apostle’s doctrinal teaching 
very plainly show. 

On coming now to examine the passage Rom. vil. 7—25, 
we find sin there spoken of as an immanent power—Sin— 
sharply distinguished from the individual in whom it dwells. 
To this power the sinner is in bondage in spite of himself; 
he is sold to it as a slave, and is dominated by it. So strongly 
is this fact expressed, that the dominion of Sin in the flesh 
and over the will is represented as inevitable. The man’s 
will may be good, but it is absolutely overborne by the irre- 
sistible might of Sin in the flesh. But here the apostle speaks 
figuratively—Sin is a mere personification of an abstraction ; 
and he also describes facts as they present themselves to 
unreflective practical experfence, not as they really are. In 
Rom. vi. 12 ff, it is distinctly taught that the power Sin can 
be made subservient to the will. The rule of Sin in our 
mortal body can be resisted: the surrender of the bodily 
members to Sin can be withheld: the service of Sin is not 
inevitable, but voluntary. The will, in fact, is for S. Paul the 
only ultimate source of sin; although at times, in using the 
language of practical experience, he sometimes allows expres- 
sions to escape him which appear to imply another meaning : 
expressions which have frequently been seized upon in the 
interests of rigorous and vigorous system-making. 

A man’s sinfulness, then, is not accounted for by S. Paul 
as being due to a rea/ Sin-power or agent which dwells within 
him. Nor is it explained by the supposition of the necessary 
and inherent sinfulness of the flesh. It is true that the flesh 
is regarded by S. Paul as the seat or abode of sin when he 
figuratively speaks of sin as an indwelling power. Not only 
does he use the expressions ‘flesh of sin,’ ‘passions of sins,’ 
but goes so far as to identify the flesh with the sin-power 
itself, which he generally represents as only immanent in the 
flesh. Thus, in Rom. viii. 4—9, the flesh is contrasted with the 
spirit; its mind (φρόνημα) is ‘enmity against God,’ and neither 
is, nor can be, ‘subject to the law of God. In Gal. v. 17—24, 
again, the flesh is the power ‘which lusteth against the spirit,’ 


x1] of the Fall 260 


and various grave sins are called ‘works of the flesh. The 
link between the idea of an immanent sin-power and the 
thought of the passages just cited is found in the conception 
of ‘a law in the members’ opposed to the ‘law of the mind, 
or a law of sin opposed to the law of God. There is no doubt 
that language such as that just quoted would suit well with a 
metaphysical dualism ; and some have not hesitated to attri- 
bute such a philosophical position to S. Paul. 

There is no reason why S. Paul should not have been 
familiar with dualism as it existed in Hellenic thought; but 
that he embraced it or held it is a supposition obviously in- 
compatible with the general tenour of his teaching. The 
sinfulness of the flesh is for him an unphilosophical descrip- 
tion of practical experience and not a doctrine derived from 

Ϊ metaphysical speculation ; and the truth is expressed in the 
\ language of unreflective common. sense, not that of psycho- 
/ logical analysis. Moreover 5. Paul speaks of the flesh as it 
~ is actually found, not as if originally and_ essentially must 
have been. If human sinfulness is referred back to the flesh 
as a preceding link in the chain of causation, it is not thereby 
ΠΕΤΗ͂ΣΙ ΠῚ to its ultimate and absolute source. The flesh is 
sinful ’ simply i in the loose sense that it is generally the most 
conspicuous instrument of the sinful will. The psychological ie 
arigin .of.sin_is. nowhereinvestigated by the apostle. Con- 


ad 


sequently his writin gs, while testifying t to the existence of the 
actual conflict between flesh ἃ and_ spirit as_a_matter_of fact, 
furnish no explanation_of_the cause of the conflict, nor do 
they tell us how_the flesh Seite sinful. It would seem that 
S. Paul does not regard a man’s sinfulness as exclusively the 
result of habit, or due only to the repetition of sinful acts and 
to the surrender of the will to inclinations of the flesh or to 
the motions of an indwelling ‘power. of evil. On the contrary, 
he seems to imply that sin is in man before the consciousness 
of the Jaw arrives to constitute its guilt. As Ritschl has said’, 
S. Paul held that man is not sinful because he commits sins, 
but commits sins because he is sinful. But why he is sinful 
the apostle nowhere explains’, The tracing of sin back to 


1 Die Altkatholische Kirche, 8. 64. 
2 In connexion with what is said here see next foot-note. 


270 S. Pauls Doctrine [ CHAP. 


Adam’s fall _as_its historical beginning does not solve the 
question ; | for we still need to ask why did ‘Adam sin, or 
whether, in the inaccurate language of popular theology 
Adam’s nature was originally sinful ? 

The passage 1 Cor. xv. 45—50 has sometimes been ap- 
pealed to in connexion with the point now under consideration. 
It does not seem, however, to be very pertinent. That Adam 
is there represented as by nature ‘earthy’ (yoixos), may imply 
that his body was naturally corruptible, and that he was 
endowed with human appetites and passions. But it by no 
means implies that he was by nature ‘sinful’ in the sense in 
which that term is referred by 5. Paul to ‘the flesh. Nor, on 
the other hand, can it be assumed that in this passage S. Paul 
is speaking of Adam’s nature as it was corrupted by his sin 
and then transmitted to his descendants. This is the opinion 
of some writers, who are driven to such an interpretation 
because it alone seems to them sufficient to reconcile S. Paul’s 
doctrine of Adam’s nature with what they take to be his 
teaching as to the effects of Adam’s fall in Rom. v. 12 ff. 
But it is a gratuitous assumption that S. Paul did so combine 
the thoughts of these two passages as to hold a doctrine of 
inherited corruption ; and indeed the passage 1 Cor. xv. 45 ff. 
has no reference whatever to the question of sin}. 

And it is similarly illegitimate to combine together 
S. Paul’s teaching as to the Fall in Rom. v. and what he 
writes elsewhere about the sinfulness of the flesh. He no- 
where implies that the supremacy of the flesh over the spirit 
is a consequence of the first transgression. It must be 
concluded then that strict exegesis fails to find a doctrine 
of inherited corruption of human nature in S. Paul’s theology. 
And it is noticeable that he says absolutely nothing of an 
original righteousness, or a sharply defined ‘unfallen state.’ 

Nor will this conclusion need to be revised in the light of 


1 It would rather seem that S. Paul regarded Adam and all mankind as at 
first simply natural beings, non-moral and therefore sinless, until the spiritual side 
is awakened by the advent of consciousness of law; then emerges sin, which was 
before ‘dead,’ or, as we should say, non-existent. In Rom. vii. this development 
is described in words that suggest an application of the Fall-story. And perhaps 
we thus get a deeper insight into the apostle’s mind than we do from his reatmeu 
of the common tradition underlying Rom. v. 12. 


ΧΙ] of the Fall 271 


the words (Eph. ii. 3): “we are by nature children of wrath.” 
gdi'cec does not refer here to heredity, but to the natural 
state before conversion, apart from the grace of God. There 
is not necessarily any allusion to a sinfulness which is not the 
result of personal volition, of habit and sinful intercourse. 

The arguments given in the /zternational Critical Commen- 
tary on the Epistle to the Ephesians by T. K. Abbott seem 
to be conclusive against such exegesis as would extract from 
this verse an implication of the doctrine of inherited depravity. 
Dr Abbott is, of course, by no means alone amongst modern 
commentators in his opinion as to the meaning of this 
passage. The reader may also be referred, for instance, to 
Stevens’s remarks upon the verse’. 

It is noteworthy that S. Paul does not express his doctrine 
of sin in terms of the doctrine of the evil yezer. He uses no 
expression which can be identified with evil inclination. That 
his contrast between flesh and spirit has little resemblance to 
the rabbinical contrast of the good and evil yezers, has been 
abundantly established by Dr Porter?, Unlike the Rabbis 
and the author of 4 Ezra, S. Paul seems to have regarded evil 
as first appearing in the Fall, and therefore in the free-will of 
Adam: not in an evil inclination implanted in him at first by 
the Creator. 

A few words may be said with regard to a passage in 
which S. Paul seems to teach that the transgression of Adam 
was a catastrophe having far-reaching results in the world of 


Nature. From Rom. viii. 18 ff, it would appear that the 


apostle regarded the present condition of creation as “ neither 
original nor final.” The world was subjected, at a definite 
time, “to vanity,’ to a “bondage of corruption” in which it 
groans and travails; and, like our body, it awaits redemption. 
The occurrence of this idea in S. Paul’s writing is interesting, 
but it throws no light upon his view as to whether or not the 
Fall affected the nature of man. It was, of course, not original 
with him. The apocalyptic writers of his time were familiar 
with it, and it is met with in the rabbinic traditions which 


were written down in a later age’. 
* * * * * * 


Sepperi7, Ὁ. 153 fi, SOP. Cie 3 For references see above, p. 247. 


-“--.....ὕ..- 


272. ὁ. Paul's Doctrine of the Fall |CHAP. x1 


The discussion prosecuted in this chapter doubtless raises 
questions connected with our attitude towards the New 
Testament writings and the validity of statements directly 
made in them. The present writer will not need to repeat 
here what he has already said elsewhere upon this serious 
topic’. But it must be added that, if S. Paul’s statements on 
the connexion between Adam’s fall and human sin and death 


are essentially founded upon, and are largely a reproduction 
of, the speculations of Jewish writers who preceded him, then 
they cannot be looked upon as embodying truth, so far as 
matters of history, science or philosophy are concerned, which 
\was given to the world for the first time through the medium 
of Christianity. It must be concluded from the foregoing 
chapters that the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin 
have their beginnings, as doctrines, neither_in the Old Testa- 
ment nor in the New, but rather in the Jewish speculation 
and the uncanonical ]. Jiterature of the age which intervened 


between them. It was s thence that_S. Paul derived, ready- 


made, his teaching as to the influence of the first man and his 
sin upon ‘the race. ‘It was therefore thence also, through 
S. Paul, that the Christian Church derived the main con- 
ception out of which the ecclesiastical doctrine of the origin 
and propagation of human sinfulness was at length elaborated. 
(We are not at all concerned here with S. Paul’s teaching on 
'sin in general, derived from his personal experience and 
| finding an echo in the experience of all mankind, but solely 
‘with the form of that part of it which deals with the conse- 
‘ quences of Adam’s s sin. ‘This, it must be maintained, belongs 


‘to the elements which ich the apostle derived from the common 


intellectual s surroundings of his time, and not to the essential 
contents of the Christian revelation. 


ἘΦ 72.) 1441]: 


ΘΕ ΧΎΠ 


THESDOCTRINES OF THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
IN THE FATHERS BEFORE AUGUSTINE. 


THE concluding words of the last chapter might seem 
fitly to close an inquiry as to the sources of the doctrines 
of the Fall and Original Sin, especially if the word ‘sources’ 
be taken very literally. But this work assumes that the 
doctrines with whose earlier history it is concerned did not 
receive definite shape and fulness of content until, during the 
Pelagian controversy in which they were largely involved, 
they were systematised by the comprehensive mind of 
S. Augustine. They underwent, of course, much modification 
and development in subsequent ages; but with such later 
growth the present treatise has no concern. The point is 
that the Christian doctrine of the Fall and of its consequences 
certainly did not exist in anything like completeness in the 
mind of S. Paul, whereas it had practically assumed its 
completeness in that of S. Augustine. For this reason, there- 
fore, it will be necessary to examine in some detail the 
teaching of the earliest writers within the Church on the 
subject of human sinfulness, until the elements contributed 
to the later doctrine by Irenzus, Origen and Tertullian have 
been respectively estimated and accounted for. So far we 
shall still, in some sense, be concerned with sources. For it 
will be seen that the fairly definite results of Jewish exegesis 
and speculation on the Fall, and the theories elaborated by 
several pseudepigraphic writers, however much of Augustinian 
thought they anticipated, were not taken over by the earliest 
ecclesiastical writers, save in so far as these results were in- 
definitely and incompletely summarised in S. Paul’s brief 


ἘΝ 18 


274 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


statements about the connexion between man’s sinfulness 
and Adam’s sin. The Church rather began the work of 
elaborating a theo.y of the origin and propagation of human 
sin de novo. Truly, S. Paul’s conception of the solidarity 
of the race in Adam, once the apostle’s writings came to 
possess canonical authority, was a guiding principle for 
patristic speculation generally. Of course, too, the Fall-story 
of Genesis was regarded as a fount of revealed truth: for 
some time it was the only ‘Scripture’ the Church pos- 
sessed upon the subject of the Fall. But it is noteworthy 
that such elements of doctrine as are not hinted at in the 
Paradise-narrative of Genesis, and are only vaguely sketched 
in 5. Paul’s allusions to the Fall, or are wholly absent from 
it, but which appear definitely in the doctrine of Original Sin 
elaborated by the Church, were suggested to their various 
contributors from wholly new sources, whence had _ been 
derived no part of the relatively complete Jewish doctrine 
on the subject. It will be pointed out in the succeeding pages 
that, of three main constructors of the doctrine of the Fall 
before Augustine, namely Irenzus, Origen and Tertullian, 
each derived his particular contribution of material for the 
future fabric from reflection on texts, doctrines, speculations 
or institutions, of which some could not have been; and none 
of which were, sources of such similar conclusions as shad 
previously been reached by Jewish thought. Inasmuch, then, 
as the main stream of speculation not only becomes more 
defined, because flowing through limiting channels, but also 
becomes enriched, through the addition of tributary rivulets 
of doctrine arising from new sources, during the period which 
intervened between the ages of S. Paul and S. Augustine, the 
task undertaken by this volume has not as yet been accom- 
plished. The course of thought on the Fall and Original Sin 
within the Church as far as the middle of the third century 
needs to be traced in some detail. Comparatively little, 


1 This statement needs perhaps to be qualified in some small degree; a detail 
of quite subsidiary importance may have been borrowed here and there from Jewish 
thought. Thus Tertullian and Origen may have derived their ideas of the race 
having been ‘ poisoned’ by the Serpent (see below), from the Jewish legend of the 
inguinamentum mentioned in Chap. VII. 


xu] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 278 


however, will then require to be said of the teaching of the 
numerous fathers between Tertullian and Origen on the 
one hand and Augustine on the other. Such matter scarcely 
belongs to the scope of the present work; and, moreover, 
it is already accessible to the student in the books of special- 
ists in the history of Christian doctrine. The more nearly 
the age of the Pelagian controversy is approached, the less 
pretext and necessity will there be to discuss here the 
passages of patristic writings which are relevant to the subject 
in hand, save in so far as they may be regarded strictly 
as sources of the Augustinian theory of the origin and propa- 
gation of human sinfulness. 


I THE APOSTOLIC FATHERS. 


The Apostolic Fathers never-had occasion to discuss the 
question of the influence of Adam’s sin upon his descendants. 
The Epistle of Barnabas alludes to the first transgression, but 
not in connexion with the origin and the nature of sin’. 
Polycarp speaks of the universality of sin, but not of the 
cause thereof. Ignatius, after S. John, conceives of the world 
as lying in wickedness, in the might of Satan and under the 
rule of death’, or in a state of φθορά; but this state is not 
ascribed to the fall of mankind in its first parent. 


11 THE GREEK APOLOGISTS. 
Justin Martyr. 


It is when we come to Justin Martyr’s writings that we 
first need to weigh the question whether or not an approach 
towards the doctrine of Original Sin is to be detected. Justin 
speaks strongly of the universality of sin’, and of our need 
of grace; and he alludes to an evil inclination which is in 
the nature of every man‘. These things, however, are not 
deduced from, or connected with, the Fall. When that event 
is mentioned, Justin would seem to represent it merely as the 


Side SEE DA. ΤΟ: Bel alcws sy pA. δ τς 


4 τὴν ἐν ἑκάστῳ κακὴν πρὸς πάντα καὶ ποικίλην φύσει ἐπιθυμίαν. Afol.c. το. 


18—2 


276 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


beginning of sin rather than as the cause of sinfulness ; and 
he does not appear to derive from it any hereditary taint or 
imputation of guilt. It is by the ‘following of Adam’ that 
mankind became corrupted. 

huss 

“But He did it (ze. was born and crucified) for the race 
of men which, from (the time of) Adam had become subject 
to death and the deceit of the serpent, each of them having 
by his own fault committed 51η}.᾿ 

And again: 

“ ..the human race, which were created like God, free 
from suffering and immortal if they should keep His com- 
mandment, and were thought worthy by Him to be called 
His sons, and yet, becoming like Adam and Eve, bring death 
upon themselves?;... all are thought worthy to become gods, 
and to have power to become sons of the Most High, and 
will be judged and condemned each for himself like Adam 
and Eve’.” 

There can be little doubt that in these passages the 
conceptions of race-solidarity, apart from influence of environ- 
ment, and of heredity, are absent. Justin takes here the 
individualist view of man’s sinfulness and death, which was 
probably the opinion prevalent amongst the Jewish Rabbis 
of his day and subsequently became a main tenet of Pela- 
gianism. All men, he seems to imply, have fallen by their 
own guilt, and because they have all acted like Adam and 
Eve. It is not that he deliberately adopted this view rather 
than its alternative; he had simply not worked out a solution 
of the problem. S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans had perhaps 
not yet attained the authority which it possessed, soon after- 
wards, for Irenaeus; at any rate its teaching exerted no 
influence on that of Justin. 

This estimate of Justin’s attitude towards the question 
of human sinfulness is not necessarily in conflict with the © 


τς τοῦ γένους τοῦ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, ὃ ἀπὸ τοῦ "Addu ὑπὸ θάνατον Kal πλάνην τὴν 


τοῦ ὄφεως ἐπεπτώκει, παρὰ τὴν ἰδίαν αἰτίαν ἑκάστου αὐτῶν πονηρευσαμένου. Dial. 
c. 88. 

2 ὁμοίως τῷ ᾿Αδὰμ καὶ τῇ Eve ἐξομοιούμενοι θάνατον ἑαυτοῖς ἐργάζονται. 

Be ial Gst ea, 


Χη] zz the Fathers before Augustine 277 


passage, sometimes appealed to as implying original sin, in 
which he asserts that man, being born the child of necessity 
and ignorance, becomes by baptism the child of choice and 
knowledget. The loss of right moral feeling, of which Justin 
speaks elsewhere, is attributed, not to the Fall, but to the 
influence of evil spirits or to corruption through bad educa- 
tion? The individual’s sin appeared to this writer only to 
have its type, not its cause, in Adam’s transgression ; and he 
knew no doctrine of Adam’s original state as one differing 
sharply from that into which every other man is born. 

It remains to mention a passage, ascribed to Justin Martyr 
in Leontius Byzantinus, Against the Nestorians, Eutychians, 
etc., Bk. 11.3, which runs as follows: 

“When God formed man at the beginning, He sus- 
pended the things of nature from his will, and made an 
experiment by means of one’ commandment. For He 
ordained that, if he kept this, he should partake of immortal 
existence; but if he transgressed it, the contrary should 
be his lot. Man having been thus made, and immediately 
looking towards transgression, naturally became subject to 
corruption. Corruption then becoming inherent in nature, it 
was necessary that He who wished to save should be one who 
destroyed the efficient cause of corruption. And this could 
not otherwise be done than by the life which is according to 
nature being united to that which had received the corruption, 
and so destroying the corruption, while preserving as immortal 
for the future that which had received it....*” 


1 Apol. c. 61. See Wendt, Christi. Lehre v. der menschl. Vollkommenheit, 
S. 12; and, on the other side, Schwane, Dogmengeschichte der vornican. Zeit, 2te 
Aufl., Bd 1. S. 309. 

* Dial. c. 93. See Hagenbach, History of Christian Doctrine, E. Tr. vol. 1. 
233. : 

3 Fragment ν., Otto, Corpus Apologet. Christian. vol. 111. p. 250 ff. The 
translation given above is from Clark, dzte-Nic. Library, vol. 11. p. 358. 

4 On the genuineness of this fragment see Hilgenfeld, Zettschrift f. wissenschaftl. 
Theologte, 1883, S. 26 ff.; and, on the other side, Von Engelhardt, Das Christen- 
thum Justin's des Martyrers, S. 432 ff. 

The original of this passage is as follows: 

Πλάσας ὁ θεὸς Kar ἀρχὰς τὸν ἄνθρωπον τῆς γνώμης αὐτοῦ Ta τῆς φύσεως 
ἀπῃώρησεν ἐντολῇ μιᾷ ποιησάμενος τὴν διάπειραν. φυλάξαντα μὲν γὰρ ταύτην τῆς 
ἀθανάτου λήξεως πεποίηκεν ἔσεσθαι, παραβάντα δὲ τῆς ἐναντίας. οὕτω γεγονὼς ὁ 


278 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


The ‘corruption’ here spoken of would seem to be syn- 
onymous with mortality. It is therefore only in the sense that 
Adam brought death upon the race, as well as upon himself, 
that we have here any doctrine of Original Sin. 


Tatian. 


Tatian is the first ecclesiastical writer to ascribe con- 
sequences other than mere physical death to the fall of the 
first parents of the race; but his teaching is indefinite if not 
inconsistent. 

This writer’s anthropology has affinity, in one respect, with 
that of Philo. He recognises in man two kinds of spirit: 
one, called the soul, which is material spirit, and another, more 
excellent than the soul, which is the image and likeness of 
God, and is indeed divine, a, ‘portion of God.’ 

The soul is not in itself immortal, but mortal; yet, through 
union with the Spirit, it is possible for it not to die. In the 
beginning, the Spirit was the constant companion of the soul, 
the first man being endowed with both®. Thus we have 
a recognition of a primitive, unfallen state, in which the souls 
of the first parents were capable of immortality and of fellow- 
ship with God. This state ceased with the Fall, which is thus 
described : 

“And, when men attached themselves to one who was 
more subtle than the rest, having regard to his being the first- 
born, and declared him to be God, though he was resisting .the 
laws of God, then the power of the Logos excluded the 
beginner of the folly and his adherents from all fellowship 
with Himself. And so he who was made in the likeness of 
God, since the more powerful spirit is separated from him, 
becomes mortal; but that first-begotten one, through his 


ἄνθρωπος καὶ πρὸς τὴν παράβασιν εὐθὺς ἐλθὼν τὴν φθορὰν φυσικῶς εἰσεδέξατο. φύσει 
δὲ τῆς φθορᾶς προσγενομένης ἀναγκαῖον ἣν ὅτι σῶσαι βουλόμενος ἦν τὴν φθοροποιὸν 
οὐσίαν ἀφανίσας. τοῦτο δὲ οὐκ ἣν ἑτέρως γενέσθαι, εἰ μήπερ ἡ κατὰ φύσιν ζωὴ 
προσεπλάκη τῷ τὴν φθορὰν δεξαμένῳ, ἀφανίζουσα μὲν τὴν φθοράν, ἀθάνατον δὲ τοῦ 
λοιποῦ τὸ δεξάμενον διατηροῦσα..... 

1 Leg. Alleg. 1: 15. Harnack, Hestory of Dogma, E. T. vol. ΤΙ p. 1gt, n. 4,- 
considers Tatian’s anthropology to be related to Gnostic theory. 

2 Contra Graecos, CC. 7, 12, 13- 


xu] 7 the Fathers before Augustine 279 


transgression and ignorance becomes a demon ; and they who 
imitate him, ze. his illusions, are become a host of demons, 
and through their freedom of choice have been given up to 
their own infatuation!” 

Thus the first man became mortal through loss of a 
principle of divine life in consequence of his fall. Similarly 
Tatian says: 

“Now in the beginning the Spirit was a constant com- 
panion of the soul, but the Spirit forsook it because it was not 
willing to follow’.” 

It would thus seem that Tatian held a pronounced doctrine 
of man’s fall from an original superior estate, whereby the 
donum superadditum of the presence of the Holy Spirit or the 
Logos, involving immortality, was lost. And yet, in the light 
of other statements of his, it is difficult to ascertain how far 
Tatian regarded the subsequent. generations of mankind as 
having been affected by their first father’s falling under the 
dominion of evil spirits. The soul is said still to retain a 
spark of the Spirit ; the Spirit still endures with such as live 
righteously*®; and the possibility of man’s recovering the old 
relationship of union with the Spirit yet remains‘. “It be- 
comes us,” we are told, “to seek now for what we once had, 
but have lost, to unite the soul with the Holy Spirit, and to 
strive after union with God*®”’ Thus, as Harnack observes’, 
“it is only in appearance that the blessing bestowed in the 


1¢.7. This passage contains a strange fusion of the story of Gen. iii. with 
some legend of the fall of demons. There are points of contact with the Znoch- 
literature, but many of the details are singular and unique. 

PE Cate. 3 zbid. 

+c. 20. Cf.c. 11: “ Die to the world, repudiating the madness that is in it, » 
and by apprehending Him lay aside your old nature. We were not created to die, 
but we die by our own fault. Our free-will has destroyed us; we who were free 
have become slaves; we have been sold through sin. Nothing evil has been 
created by God; we ourselves have manifested wickedness, but we who have 
manifested it are able again to reject it.” 

pee es 

δ of. cit. vol. 11. p. 191. See also the estimate of the teaching of the Apologists 
on human sin given on pp. 216, 217. Tatian’s doctrine of Sin is also discussed by 
Wendt, of. czt. S. 11 ff. 

The translations of passages of Tatian given above are taken from the Ax/e- 
Nicene Library. 


280 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [CHAP. 


‘Spirit’ is a donum superadditum et supernaturale. For if a 
proper spontaneous use of freedom infallibly leads to the 
return of the Spirit, it is evident that the decision and con- 
sequently the realisation of man’s destination depend on 
human freedom.” Tatian, moreover, by no means makes it 
clear how far Adam’s endowments and losses are ours also. 


Theophilus of Antioch. 


This apologist’s teaching as to the unfallen state of Adam 
differs from that of Tatian, who attributed to the first men 
that perfection of divine illumination which it is the purpose 
of Christianity to restore. 

Theophilus assigns to Adam, indeed, a more excellent state 
than has been enjoyed by subsequent generations of mankind, 
but one far short of that perfection which is man’s ultimate 
destiny. Perhaps this view was to some extent shaped by the 
exigencies of the Gnostic controversy. Certainly it evades the 
Gnostic position, that, if man is naturally mortal and evil, he is 
no creation of God, as well as the alternative difficulty, that, if 
man was originally perfect and immortal, he would then have 
been divine?. But however the doctrine may have originated, 
we find first in Theophilus of Antioch, amongst Christian 
writers, the idea that Adam was created with “a middle 
nature,” such that a course of advancement or development 
was needed before perfection could be attained. Thus: 

“ And God transferred him (Adam) from the earth, out of 
which he had been produced, into Paradise, giving him means 
of advancement, in order that, maturing and becoming perfect, 
and being even declared a god, he might then ascend into 
heaven in possession of immortality. For man had been 
made a middle nature, neither wholly mortal nor altogether 
immortal, but capable of either state.” 

And a little further on: 

“Therefore He made him neither immortai nor mortal, 
but, as we said before, capable of either state, in order that, if 
he inclined to immortal things, by keeping the commandment 


1 Ad Autol. I. 27. 


xu] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 481 


of God he might by way of reward obtain immortality from 
Him, and so become divine?.” 

We have still no sign of Christian teaching with regard to 
the Fall having been: moulded by S. Paul’s treatment of the 
subject. The Old Testament is as yet the sole source of 
inspired truth with regard to the question. But though 
Theophilus describes the fall of Adam and Eve almost wholly 
in the language of Genesis, he nevertheless betrays here and 
there that he has had access to Jewish haggada. Thus, the 
following citation will serve to show that he was familiar with 
the notion, met with in several pseudepigraphic writings, that 
the first transgression affected the animal world; it will also 
suggest how, perhaps, he represented the solidarity of the 
race in the consequences of Adam’s sin. After stating that 
the animals were not made evil or venomous at the first®, for 
nothing was made evil by God, Theophilus continues : 

“But the sin in which man was concerned brought evil 
upon them. For when man transgressed, they also trans- 
gressed with him. For as, if the master of the house acts 
rightly, the domestics also of necessity conduct themselves 
well; but if the master sins, the servants also sin with him; 
so in like manner it came to pass, that in the case of man’s 
sin, he being master, all that was subject to him sinned with 
him. When, therefore, man shall have made his way back to 
his natural condition, and no longer does evil, those also shall 
be restored to their original gentleness®.” 

1 Meré@nxe δὲ αὐτὸν ὁ θεὸς ἐκ τῆς γῆς, ἐξ ἧς ἐγεγόνει, els τὸν παράδεισον, διδοὺς 
αὐτῷ ἀφορμὴν προκοπῆς, ὅπως αὐξάνων καὶ τέλειος γενόμενος, ἔτι δὲ καὶ ἀναδειχθεὶς 
θεός, οὕτως καὶ εἰς τὸν οὐρανὸν ἀναβῇ... 

Οὔτε οὖν ἀθάνατον αὐτὸν ἐποίησεν, οὔτε μὴν θνητόν, ἀλλά, καθὼς ἐπάνω 
προειρήκαμεν, δεκτικὸν ἀμφοτέρων, ἵνα, εἰ ῥέψῃ ἐπὶ τὰ τῆς ἀθανασίας, τηρήσας τὴν 
ἐντολὴν τοῦ θεοῦ μισθὸν κομίσηται παρ᾽ αὐτοῦ τὴν ἀθανασίαν, καὶ γένηται θεός. Ad 
Autol. 11. cc. 24 and 27. 

2 This assertion may possibly have been suggested by Wisdom i. 14. So also 
may the word μέσος, used to describe Adam’s nature, be borrowed from Philo; see 
above, p. 135. The Apologists seem to have been considerably influenced, as 
regards their anthropology, by Alexandrian writings; cf. their doctrine of man’s 
higher spirit with that of Philo, and their insistence on immortality, as especially 
the original endowment or the final goal of man, with the teaching of Wisdom. 

3 11.17. Whatever may be thought of the truthfulness to life of the analogy of 


which Theophilus here makes use, we can see in it a feeling after the conception 
of moral solidarity. 


282 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


In accordance with the idea that Adam was created for 
development, we find in Theophilus the fancy, which spread 
to other Fathers, that the first parents of the race were but 
“infants” in age at the time of their transgression. Their sin 
was associated with the desire to become wise beyond their 
years: “And at the same time He wished man, infant as he 
was, to remain for some time longer simple and sincere?” 


ATHENAGORAS. 


Athenagoras does not allude to the consequences of the Fall. He 
attributes the sinfulness of the human soul partly to its contact with 
matter, and partly to the influence of the demons, of whose (present) 
activity he, along with other Greek apologists, holds a view similar to 
that of the Book of Enoch. 


It will have been seen, from what has been said of the 
Greek Apologists, that they had not advanced very far 
towards the later ecclesiastical doctrine of Original Sin. They 
differ in their conceptions of the unfallen state of man, and 
are very indefinite in their estimation of the consequences for 
the race of the fall of its first parents. They do not seem to 
have thought of such a thing as a tainted nature having been 
thereby imparted to mankind; man’s psychological condition, 
his freedom of will and other moral capacities, are not repre- 
sented as having suffered change; nor are his natural desires 
and appetites conceived as in any way sinful in themselves: 
sin is in the will alone. The sinfulness of Adam’s posterity 
is due to the following of Adam’s example in becoming 
subject to the dominion of evil spirits. Its universality is not 
associated with the unity and solidarity of the race. The 
influence of S. Paul had not as yet begun to be felt. But in 
several interesting details these apologists, especially Tatian 
and Theophilus, prepared the way for the more systematic 
writer whose work we have next to examine. 


10: | IRENAEUS. 


Irenaeus builds to some extent upon ideas occurring in the 
writings of the Greek apologists. His doctrine is founded in 


al 
_— 
Le) 
nN 
γι 


xt] 7 the Fathers before Augustine 283 


part upon conceptions utilised by his predecessors in their 
scanty descriptions of Christianity as a plan of redemption 
from sin; and it is therefore, so far, a development possessing 
continuity with what had gone before. Thus, the teaching 
of Tatian, that the higher: spiritual principle in man is not 
part of his nature, but the indwelling Holy Spirit or a 
divine effluence, and the loss of this at the Fall was the cause 
of man’s mortality, is sometimes presupposed. Similarly, 
Irenaeus makes use of the very different, if not irreconcilable 
idea, met with in Theophilus of Antioch, that the first estate 
of man was not one of perfection, but one from which, in 
course of development, perfection was capable of attainment ; 
and, like Theophilus, he describes Adam, at the time of his 
sin, as an ‘infantl’ 

But in building up a doctrine of the Fall and of Original 
Sin Irenaeus advances very much further than the Greek 
apologists. He is the first constructive theologian of the 
Church. Problems such as those of the constitution of man, 
the Fall and its consequences, receive in the ddversus Haereses 
a treatment which, in comparison with such as they had 
received before, would be worthy to be called systematic, 
if only it were homogeneous and self-consistent; although, 
of course, it leaves room for very considerable amplification 
and for increased explicitness in definition. There is certainly 
a wide difference, however, as regards fulness and maturity, 
between the teaching of Irenaeus and that of Justin or of 
Tatian, concerning the fall of man and original sin. These 
doctrines begin, in Irenaeus, to assume a position of some 
importance. 

One or two reasons may be given for this advance. In 
the first place, the necessity of refuting the dualistic solution 
of the problem of evil attempted in Gnostic systems will 
perhaps account for the investment of the doctrine of the 
Fall, in Irenaeus, with an importance which had been con- 
spicuously absent in earlier Christian literature. A sharp 
demarcation of man’s original estate from that in which he is 


1 4dv. Haer. iv. 38. 1 (Mass.): οὕτως καὶ ὁ θεὸς αὐτὸς μὲν olds τε ἣν παρασχεῖν 
ἀπ᾿ ἀρχῆς τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ τὸ τέλειον, ὁ δὲ ἄνθρωπος ἀδύνατος λαβεῖν αὐτό νήπιος 
γὰρ ἦν. 


284 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


now universally found is, of course, an obvious means of 
accounting for human sinfulness without ascribing the direct 
authorship of evil either to God or to a malevolent demiurge. 
For this line of argument the early chapters of Genesis lay 
ready to hand as a starting-point. And further, the Epistles 
of S. Paul had undoubtedly, at the time when Irenaeus wrote, 
come to be accepted as Scripture, and therefore as a guide to 
doctrine if not as a source thereof. The fact that Gnostic 
writers also sometimes appealed to the authority of the 
Apostle would serve to concentrate the attention of Irenaeus 
upon the contents of his writings. As a matter of fact, the 
passages in which 5. Paul speaks of Adam in connexion with 
the sin and death of humanity are quoted by Irenaeus}, and 
the apostle’s conceptions of Adam’s representative character, 
and of the solidarity of the race with Adam, thence became 
familiar to the Christian teacher. And thus, with Gnostic 
error as external impulse, and new scriptural statements as 
authoritative guide, the rise of a Christian doctrine of the Fall 
at the precise period represented by Irenaeus may easily 
be accounted for. New conditions having arisen, a new 
departure could be made. 

Irenaeus accepts the doctrine of man’s trichotomous con- 
stitution?; though, after Tatian, he almost always conceives 
of the πνεῦμα as not a part of our nature but as something 
received, under certain conditions, from without, and indeed 
as identical with the Holy Spirit*. Here we have a prepa- 
ration for the later distinction between the dona naturalia and 
the dona superaddita possessed by man: a distinction which 
is still more nearly approached by Irenaeus when, for the first 
time amongst Church writers, he differentiates between the 
image and the likeness of God after which man is said in 

1 See iii. 18. 7, iii. 23. 8, etc. : Ν 

2 vy. 9.1. Tria sunt, ex quibus perfectus homo constat, carne, anima et 
spiritu, et altero quidem salvante et figurante, qui est spiritus, altero, quod unitur 
et formatur, quod est caro ; id vero quod inter haec est duo, quod est anima, quae 
aliquando quidem subsequens spiritum elevatur ab eo, aliquando autem consentiens 
carni decidit in terrenas concupiscentias. 

ὅν. 6, τ. Anima autem et spiritus pars hominum esse possunt, homo autem 


nequaquam : perfectus autem homo commixtio et adunitio est animae assumentis 
spiritumn Patris et admixta ei carni, quae est plasma secundum imaginem Dei. 


xu] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 585 


Genesis to have been made!. This teaching is not always 
consistently maintained; for not only does Irenaeus in one 
passage seem to imply that man’s πνεῦμα belongs necessarily 
to his nature?, but also we find him now identifying man’s 
rationality and freedom of will with the ‘likeness,’ and now 
representing these endowments as belonging to man’s original 
and inalienable nature*. Nevertheless, the distinction embodies 
the writer's usual conception of man’s constitution. The image 
of God, then, was possessed by man from the first, and has never 
been lost. With regard to the likeness of God, it has been 
shown by Wendt4, who has been followed by Harnack and 
others, that the writings of Irenaeus disclose two incompatible 
lines of doctrine, which run, moreover, through his teaching 
concerning the Fall and its effects, and consequently also 
through his treatment of the theology of Redemption or, more 
correctly speaking, of the mediatorial work of Christ. It has 
embarrassed many students of this Father to find, on different 
pages of his writings, statements so diverse as, for instance, 
the following: that man was made at the first after both 
image and likeness of God*; that both image and likeness 
were lost through Adam’s fall®; that the image and likeness 
were both absent from man when he was first created, and 
were to be afterwards attained’; that man was created after 
the divine image’, the likeness being separately received 
through the Spirit®, and alone lost by man”. 

These discrepancies receive some explanation when the 
discordant passages are regarded as illustrations, some of the 
one, and some of the other, of the two main lines of teaching 
which Irenaeus has been stated to present. 

The one of these is called by Harnack" ‘apologetic and 
moralistic, and is said by him to be ‘alone developed with 


1 Erbkam, De S. Lrenaei Principits Ethiczts, points out that Philo uses the 
terms image and likeness quite differently, the latter being used only to explain the 
former and not to express a new idea. A distinction similar to that of Irenaeus 


occurs, however, in Clem. Hom. ΧΙ. 4: εἰκὼν θεοῦ ὁ ἄνθρωπος.---- Τὴν δὲ ὁμοιότητα 
οὐκέτι πάντες, ἀλλ᾽ ἀγαθῆς ψυχῆς ὁ καθαρὸς νοῦς. 


5|811:5...}5. δ εν 27. 4 ὉΠ ΠΡ 04 Zan Ty AV 4:.3. 6ῖ0: 

ΒΡ. 0)2.. 22}. σιν, 28: 

VRS Be & 7 iv. 38. 3 and 4. δεν aLOuls 

Rive δα, LS es dee τ᾿ 11 Op. cit. vol. 11. p. 268. 


286 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


systematic clearness. It is based on the doctrine, already 
encountered in Theophilus of Antioch, that man was originally 
created imperfect, and was indeed at first incapable of appre- 
hending perfection. Perfection is the destination, not the 
original endowment, of mankind’. The likeness to God 
(ὁμοίωσις) is realised by the union of man’s soul with the 
Spirit, and consists in the possession of the Spirit and of 
fellowship with God. It is thus subject to growth, and was 
not possessed by Adam at the first, save only in the germ. 

Consistently with this doctrine of man, Irenaeus ought to 
teach that the fall of Adam only concerned our first parent 
himself, or at most that it retarded the development of the 
ὁμοίωσις in subsequent generations. And indeed he sometimes 
expresses himself, especially when thinking of sin rather than 
death, as if he adopted the former of these views. Thus he 
does not regard the race as having been in any degree deprived 
of communion with God except through their own choice of 
evil: 

“And to as many as continue in their love towards God 
does He grant communion with Him. But communion with 
God is life and light, and the enjoyment of all the benefits 
which He has in store. But on as many as, according to 
their own choice, depart from God, He inflicts that separation 


1 iv. 38. 1 (Eng. tr. Clark, Ante-Nicene Library): “Τῇ, however, any one say, 
‘What then? could not God have exhibited man as perfect from the beginning ?’” 
let him know that, inasmuch as God is indeed always the same and unbegotten as 
respects Himself, all things are possible to Him. But created things must be 
inferior to Him who created them, from the very fact of their later origin; for it 
was not possible for things recently created to have been uncreated. But inasmuch 
as they are not uncreated, for this very reason do they come short of the perfect. 
Because, as these things are of later date, so are they infantile; so are they 
unaccustomed to, and unexercised in, perfect discipline. For as it certainly is in 
the power of a mother to give strong food to her infant, [but she does not do so], 
as the child is not yet able to receive more substantial nourishment; so also it was 
possible for God Himself to have made man perfect from the first, but man could 
not receive this [perfection], being as yet an infant.” : 

Cf. iv. 38. 2, ‘So, in like manner, God had power at the beginning to grant 
perfection to man; but as the latter was only recently created, he could not 
possibly have received it, could he have contained it, or containing it, could he 
have retained it.” 

Throughout this chapter the image and likeness of God are conceived as 
endowments gradually to be attained by man. 


xu] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 587 


from Himself which they have chosen of their own accord. 
But separation from God is death, and separation from light 
is darkness; and separation from God consists in the loss 
of all the benefits which He has in store!.” 

Like the apologists before him, Irenaeus always strongly 
insists on man’s unimpaired freedom; and, in accordance 
with the line of teaching at present under consideration, he 
sometimes implies that this freedom, responding to the divine 
commandments and the reforming influences of Christ, renders 
man capable of receiving incorruptibility?, Consequently it 
may be concluded, with Wendt, that one side of Irenaeus’s 
doctrine involves the view that “the original destination of 
mankind was not abrogated by the Fall.” Whether the 
further statement of this writer is equally true, that “the 
Fall,” for Irenaeus, “was intended as a means of leading men 
to attain this perfection to which:they were destined,” or, in 
Harnack’s words, Irenaeus “contemplates the Fall as having 
a teleological significance,” is much more doubtful. It cannot 
be granted that Irenaeus seeks to “palliate” man’s fall; nor 
does it follow that, because he points out how God in mercy 
used Adam’s disobedience and its consequences for educa- 
tional purposes, these things were not contingencies, but 
foreordained ends as well as means: which is what is implied 
in attributing to them ‘teleological significance®’. 

It has now to be shown that Irenaeus also taught a more 
thorough doctrine of the Fall, scarcely consistent with that 
previously traced. 

It is connected with that side of the anthropological 
teaching of this writer which attributes possession of the 
likeness, as well as the image, of God to man at the first. 

1 vy. 27. 2, Eng. tr. of Clark, Avszte-Micene Library. 

Harnack, /oc. czt., has collected other passages in illustration of this line of 
thought, which he calls ‘ subjective moralism.’ 

* For references see Harnack, of. czt. vol. 11, p. 271. 

δ Harnack, of. cit. pp. 270-1. When this writer says, on the same page: 
‘** Here life and death are always the ultimate question to Irenaeus. It is only 
when he quotes sayings of Paul that he remembers sin in connexion with 
redemption : and ethical consequences of the Fall are not mentioned in this con- 
nexion,”’ he would seem to be seeking unduly to minimise the moral element in 


the Father’s teaching; for are not death and life synonymous, in Irenaeus, for 
communion with, and separation from, God? See v. 27. 2, quoted above. 


288 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


This likeness is said, in more than one passage, to have been 
lost at the Fall. We are thus presented with a different 
conception of man’s original state, and one which was in all 
probability forced upon Irenaeus as a consequence of his 
doctrine of Recapitulation. Derived ultimately from S. Paul’s 
expression ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι applied to Christ in Eph. i. 10, 
this doctrine teaches that our Lord summed up in Himself all 
that belonged to human nature as it was destined to be and 
become, and it includes, or is inextricably interwoven with, the 
closely allied idea that He repeated what was at the beginning, 
and restored humanity to what it originally was. It is 
obvious that the application of such a doctrine to the problems 
of man’s constitution and of the Fall and its consequences 
necessarily opens out a new train of thought with regard to 
these subjects. It led Irenaeus away from the position in which 
he would have found himself in harmony with Theophilus of 
Antioch, and brought him into agreement rather with Tatian. 
If Christ restored humanity to what it originally was, humanity 
could not have been at first imperfect. The image and 
likeness of God must have been the possession of Adam from 
the first ; and this, it has been seen, was what Irenaeus actually 
sometimes taught. 

Further, inasmuch as the Recapitulation doctrine implies 
that Christ is the sum and representative of restored humanity, 
analogy requires that Adam should have similarly been the 
type and totality of mankind. This again was actually the 
teaching of Irenaeus; and in its development he was doubtless 
aided by the Pauline doctrine of the solidarity of the race 
in Adam. Adam is frequently identified with the race and 


1 jii. 18. 1. Sed quando incarnatus est, et homo factus, longam hominum 
expositionem in seipso recapitulavit, in compendio nobis salutem praestans, ut quod 
perdideramus in Adam, id est, secundum imaginem et similitudinem esse Dei, hoc 
in Christo Jesu reciperemus. 

v. 16. 2. Ἐν rots πρόσθεν χρόνοις ἐλέγετο μὲν κατ᾽ εἰκόνα θεοῦ γεγονέναι τὸν 
ἄνθρωπον, οὐκ ἐδείκνυτο δέ" ἔτι yap ἀόρατος ἦν ὁ Λόγος, οὗ Kar’ εἰκόνα ὁ ἄνθρωπος 
ἐγεγόνει: διὰ τοῦτο δὴ καὶ τὴν ὁμοίωσιν ῥᾳδίως ἀπέβαλεν. 

In v. 1. 1, we are said to have been ‘ by nature’ (the property) of God, and to 
have been tyrannised over unjustly by apostasy, and alienated ‘ contrary to nature.’ 

ν. 2. I, ...restaurans suo plasmati quod dictum est in principio, factum esse 
hominem secundum imaginem et similitudinem Dei. 


xu] wm the Fathers before Augustine 289 


the race with him. We sinned against God in Adam, and 
through Eve the whole of humanity became liable to death’. 

Passages such as those cited below occur frequently in the 
parts of his work in which Irenaeus elaborates his doctrine of 
Recapitulation. In some he quotes from Rom. v. 12 ff An 
examination of these passages will show that the identification 
of the human race with Adam which they assert is of the 
same kind as that which, if the result arrived at in the 
foregoing chapter be correct, is to be found in the writings of 
S. Paul. That is to say, Irenaeus does not conceive of the 
race as existing seminally in Adam, nor as one with Adam in 
the sense of philosophical realism. The union or identity of 
which he speaks is rather what is often called, for want of a 
better term, mystical; it figuratively and pregnantly expresses 
a fact in its ideality but does not concern itself with describing 
the means by which the fact is. made an actuality. The 
doctrine of Redemption implied in the notion of Recapitula- 
tion is similarly ‘mystical.’ 


1 iv. 22. τ. Hic est enim finis humani generis haeredificantis Deum; uti 
quemadmodum in initio per primos, omnes in servitutem redacti sumus debito 
mortis, sic in ultimo per novissimum omnes qui ab initio discipuli, emundati 
et abluti quae sunt mortis, in vitam veniant Dei. 

lili. 22. 4. Eva...inobediens facta, et sibi, et universo generi humano causa 
facta est mortis; sic et Maria...obediens, et sibi et universo generi humano causa 
facta est salutis. Cf. v. 19. I. 

v. 16. 3. Quoniam autem per haec, per quae non obedivimus Deo, et non 
credidimus ejus verbo, per haec eadem obedientiam introduxit, et eam quae esset 
erga Verbum ejus assensionem, per quae manifeste ipsum ostendit Deum: quem 
in primo quidem Adam offendimus, non facientes ejus praeceptum ; in secundo 
autem Adam reconciliati sumus, obedientes usque ad mortem facti. Neque enim 
alteri cuidam eramus debitores, sed illi, cujus et praeceptum transgressi fueramus 
ab initio. , 

v. 34. 2. Dolor autem plagae est, per quam percussus est homo initio in 

Adam inobediens, hoc est, mors... 
_ -Y. 21. 1. Omnia ergo recapitulans recapitulatus est, et adversus inimicum 
nostrum bellum provocans, et elidens eum qui, in initio in Adam captivos duxerat 
NOE, ΜΌΝ τες Propter hoc et Dominus semetipsum Filium Hominis confitetur, 
principalem hominem illum, ex quo ea quae secundum mulierem est plasmatio 
facta est, in semetipsum recapitulans: uti quemadmodum per hominem victum 
descendit in mortem genus nostrum, sic iterum per hominem victorem ascendamus 
in vitam. 

vy. 17. 3. Uti quemadmodum per lignum facti sumus debitores Deo, per 
lignum accipiamus nostri debiti remissionem. 

2.62. ¥.10. τ; 111: 18: ἡ. 


τὸ 19 


200 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


The Fall then, with Irenaeus, is the collective deed of the 
race; provided that such a statement is not interpreted literally 
or realistically, but is understood to leave the mode in which 
Adam and his posterity are actually connected together in 
the first sin entirely undefined, and to express the relation 
rather by means of figure than by means of theory or concrete 
fact. 

Irenaeus thus prepares the way for later doctrine as to 
the explicit manner in which we “ were all in Adam, and were 
Adam, when he sinned”; and his language on the subject of 
human solidarity is interesting as the earliest patristic de- 
velopment of S. Paul’s teaching contained in the fifth chapter 
of his Epistle to the Romans. 

But if Irenaeus thus vaguely anticipates one side of the 
Augustinian theory by insisting on Adam’s sin being in some 
sense ours, he never seems to hint at the other main factor of 
it, viz. the conception of inherited corruption of nature, which 
was destined to appear with clear-cut definition in Tertullian. 
He speaks indeed of death as inherited’, and it is true that 
death usually means, with this Father, something more than 
physical death; but it is not implied here that Adam’s act 
was the productive cause of an ingrained and inherited bias 
to sinfulness. Other passages as well as the one just referred 
to have been quoted by Duncker in proof of the view that 
Irenaeus was the founder of this second element in the 
Augustinian theory of original sin?; but they have been 
rejected as wholly inadequate for the purpose by most 
students of Irenaeus, and certainly do not seem to necessitate 
such a construction as would derive from them the idea of 
propagation of hereditary moral taint. The mode of pro- 
duction of sin amongst mankind is left an open question. 
The ‘flesh’ is never, as in S. Paul, regarded as the seat or 
occasion of sin; still less is the ‘flesh’ as disordered by 
Adam’s fall; sin is always traced to the will. Irenaeus 
maintains the need of baptismal regeneration, but not in 
connexion with any inborn taint of sin generated by the 


SREY 
BURG Eh 1 2 ἢ γῶ2ΠπΠ!ὯΠ toa Ae eee 


χη] μη the Fathers before Augustine 201 


Fall. Sin, again, is universal, and, since the first great 
transgression, all mankind is in a state of sin; but in the 
passage where man’s apostasy and sonship to the devil is 
. spoken of there is .no reference even to solidarity, much less 
to the precise mode of it specified in the theory of transmitted 
depravity of nature’. 

It may be concluded then that Irenaeus was the first to 
initiate the elaboration of the doctrines of the Fall and of 
Original Sin in the Christian Church, and to insist on the unity 
of the race with Adam on the lines laid down in S. Paul’s 
brief and incidental treatment of the subject. But, unlike 
S. Paul, he does not emphasise the subjective aspect of sin as 
an inherent disease; he is silent about ‘evil concupiscence.’ 
Consequently he is not impelled to seek in the Fall an ex- 
planation of human infirmity and of man’s sinful tendencies. 
He therefore stops short altogether of a doctrine of inherited 
corruption ; and in this respect he still represents the attitude 
of the Greek Apologists before him, rather than that of the 
Fathers of the West in the succeeding generations. 


IV. THE EARLY ALEXANDRINES. 


Clement. 


The doctrine of the Fall, which had begun to assume 
a position of some importance in the writings of Irenaeus, 
recedes into insignificance in Clement of Alexandria. The 
teaching of this Father on the subject reverts almost to the 
plane of development previously attained in the Greek 
Apologists. Clement was not unfamiliar with the literary 
work of Irenaeus; but the Paulinism of the latter writer, at 
least on its anthropological side, obtained no grip on the 
mind of the Alexandrian. The conception of Adam as 
representing or including the human race, in which Irenaeus 
anticipated in an indefinite manner one main element in the 
Augustinian theory of Original Sin, is wanting in the works of 


1 y. 15. 3. Et quoniam in illa plasmatione, quae secundum Adam fuit, in 
transgressione factus homo, indigebat lavacro regenerationis... 
BEV, ATs: 2. 


19--2 


202 Lhe Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


Clement. The other element of this later theory, inheritance 
of corrupted nature, a doctrine which arose during Clement’s 
lifetime in the Church of the West, is not only absent from 
his writings but inconsistent with his theological system; and 
indeed the traducianist psychology, with which, at its first 
appearance within the Church, this doctrine was closely 
connected, is definitely repudiated in the Stromateis. Clement 
believed in the fall of Adam as a fact; but he does not deduce 
from it any theory of Original Sin. 

The question of man’s original estate was thrust upon him 
in a way similar to that in which it had been brought before 
the notice of Irenaeus and other Church writers. The Gnostic 
dilemma: if the first man was created perfect, how could he 
commit sin? elicited from Clement the same answer as had 
already been given by his predecessors in the anti-Gnostic 
struggle. Man was not made perfect, but adapted for the 
attainment of perfection’. The distinction between man’s 
original endowment with aptitude for virtue and his developed 
state of virtue is apparently identified with the distinction, 
drawn by previous writers, between the image and the likeness 
of God: 

“It is time, then, for us to say that the pious Christian 
alone is rich and wise, and of noble birth, and thus call and 
believe him to be God’s image, and also His likeness, having 
become righteous and holy and wise by Jesus Christ, and so 
far already like God?” 


1 Strom. Bk vi. cc. ΤΊ (end)-12. ‘* Above all, this ought to be known, that 
by nature we are adapted for virtue ; not so as to be possessed of it from our birth, 
but so as to be adapted for requiring it. By which consideration is solved the 
question propounded to us by the heretics, Whether Adam was created perfect 
or imperfect ? Well, if imperfect, how could the work of a perfect God—above all, 
that work being man—be imperfect? And if perfect, how did he transgress the 
commandments? For they shall hear from us that he was not perfect in his 
creation, but adapted to the reception of virtue. For it is of great importance in 
regard to virtue to be made fit for its attainment. And it is intended that we 
should be saved by ourselves. This, then, is the nature of the soul, to move of 
itself. Then, as we are rational, and philosophy being rational, we have some 
affinity with it. Now an aptitude is a movement towards virtue, not virtue itself. 
All then, as I said, are naturally constituted for the acquisition of virtue.” A7z/e- 
Nicene Library, Xi. pp. 359-60. Cf. Pued. 1. iii. In Protrept. c. x. Strom. 
V. 14, man’s mind is said to be an image of the Word, which in turn is the image 
of God. 2 Protrept. c. xii. 


xu] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 203 


More explicitly he says: 

“For is it not thus that some of our writers have under- 
stood that man straightway on his creation received what is 
‘according to the image, but what is ‘according to the 
likeness’ he will receive afterwards on his perfection ?”? 

Adam is again said to have been ‘ perfect as far as respects 
his formation,’ and in the sense that none of the distinctive 
characteristics of the idea of man were wanting to him?, 

Clement’s account of the Fall is as follows: 

“The first man, when in Paradise, sported free, because he 
was the child of God; but when he succumbed to pleasure 
(for the serpent allegorically signifies pleasure crawling on its 
belly, earthly wickedness nourished for fuel to the flames), 
was as a child seduced by lusts, and grew old in disobedience ; 
and by disobeying his Father, dishonoured God. Such was 
the influence of pleasure’®.” 

In the words that follow in this passage, Adam seems to 
be vaguely identified with mankind generally, or to be con- 
sidered as their representative : 

“Man, that had been free by reason of simplicity, was 
found fettered to sins. The Lord then wished to release him 
from his bonds, and clothing Himself with flesh—O divine 
mystery !—vanquished the serpent, and enslaved the tyrant 
death ; and, most marvellous of all, man that had been deceived 
by pleasure, and bound fast to corruption, had his hands un- 
loosed, and was set free. O mystic wonder! The Lord was 


1 Strom. ii. 22. Cf. the following passage from Paed. 1. xii. ‘*‘The view 
I take is, that He Himself (Christ) formed man of the dust, and regenerated him by 
water; and made him grow by His Spirit; and trained him by His word to 
adoption and salvation, directing him by sacred precepts; in order that, trans- 
forming earth-born man into a holy and heavenly being by His advent, He might 
fulfil to the utmost that divine utterance, ‘Let us make man in our own image 
and likeness.’ And, in truth, Christ became the perfect realisation of what God 
spake ; and the rest of humanity is conceived as being created merely in His 
image.” A.-M. Library, Iv. p. 181. 

2 Strom. iv. 23. 

3 Protrept. xi. (transl. of A.-V. Library). 

This allegorical interpretation of the serpent is of course borrowed from Philo. 
The passage should perhaps be read in the light of Strom. iii. 17, where Clement, 
repudiating the Gnostic teaching that marriage is sinful, allows that the first trans- 
gression may have consisted in the premature union of Adam and Eve. 


204 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


laid low, and man rose up; and he that fell from Paradise 
receives as the reward of obedience something greater [than 
Paradise |—namely heaven itself.” 

These words represent Clement’s nearest approach to the 
doctrine that our first parents’ sin involved posterity in its 
consequences. Yet it is improbable that they represent 
Adam’s transgression otherwise than as the type of human 
sin in general’. Clement’s teaching as to the Fall seems, 
indeed, to be quite parallel to that of Philo. And this is 
true as to the connexion of death, as well as of sin, with 
Adam’s transgression. In S¢rom. 111. 9 the passage Rom. v. 
12—14 is quoted; according to which death entered into the 
world through the sin of one man, and spread to all men, for 
that all sinned; but in the same sentence Clement adds that 
death follows upon birth brought about by generation accord- 
ing to a natural necessity of the divine economy, and that if 
woman is considered to be the cause of death, for the same 
reason she may be said to be the source of life, because she 
gives birth. In thus denying that human mortality is a pun- 
ishment for the Fall, Clement is a precursor of the teaching 
of the Antiochenes and of Pelagius”. 

If now Clement did not teach the identity of Adam and 
the race, or that his sin was also ours, and also did not regard 
even physical death as a consequence of the first transgression, 
we should not expect him to hold any form of the doctrine of 
Original Sin or hereditary guilt ; and such is actually the case. 
He explicitly rejects traducianism*’, and therefore the propa- 
gation of inherited taint in the soul itself. In reply to the 
gnostic Julius Cassianus, who condemned the generation of 
children as evil, he asks how infants could have fallen under 


1 Such is also the view of the author of Zhe Christian Platonists of Alex- 
andria. Dr Bigg, citing the words (ddumb. in Ep. Fudae), ‘Sic etiam peccato 
Adae subjacemus secundum peccati similitudinem,’ which also imply that Adam 
was the type, not the source of sin, expresses a doubt as to whether the context in 
which they occur is from the hand of Clement; p. 81, n. 1. 

2 Clement teaches, Strom. ii. 19, that Adam, through yielding to Eve’s per- 
suasion, exchanged an immortal life for mortality, though not for ever. He no- 
where implies that other men owe their mortality to Adam. 

3 Strom. vi. τό. ᾿Επεισκρίνεται δὲ ἡ ψυχὴ καὶ προεισκρίνεται τὸ ἡγεμονικόν, ᾧ 
διαλογιζόμεθα, οὐ κατὰ τὴν τοῦ σπέρματος καταβολὴν γεννώμενον. 


x11] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 205 


the curse of Adam, who have performed no actions of their 
ownl, | 

In the same context he declares that if David was “con- 
ceived in sin” (Ps. li.), the sin nevertheless did’ not attach to 
himself: ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ αὐτὸς ἐν ἁμαρτίᾳ. Thus, as Neander points 
out’, Clement unconsciously combated the doctrine of the 
North African Church, at that very time first appearing in 
Tertullian. Tertullian, as will be seen, in spite of his tradu- 
cianist doctrine of hereditary taint, did not hold the uncon- 
ditional necessity of infant baptism, and objects to hurrying 
the age of innocence to the forgiveness of sins. Perhaps he 
did not regard the inherited stain in the infant as truly of the 
nature of sin, and considered only actual sin to be washed 
away in baptism’ Clement nowhere alludes to infant bap- 
tism; nor indeed does the custom appear to have been 
established in his day in the Alexandrian Church. The sins 
forgiven in baptism are always spoken of as actual sins®. 
The things outside the will likely to be taken for the causes 
of human sin are “the weakness of matter, the involuntary 
impulses of ignorance, and irrational necessities®” ; not a fault 
of nature inherited from Adam. Finally, Clement insists 
very strongly on the unimpaired freedom of man. Sin is an 
action, not a substance’; it is not brought about through the 
agency of demons, for then the sinner would be guiltless®; 
the only sinfulness of nature is that which results from a 
man’s having become bad through choosing evil and sinning®. 


1 Strom. iil. 16. λεγέτωσαν ἡμῖν ποῦ ἐπόρνευσεν τὸ γεννηθὲν παιδίον, ἢ πῶς ὑπὸ 
τὴν τοῦ ᾿Αδὰμ ὑποπέπτωκεν ἀρὰν τὸ μηδὲν ἐνεργῆσαν. 

2. It may be noted that the two passages Job xiv. 4, 5 (LXX.) and Ps. li. 5, used 
by Clement to refute the Gnostic idea that sin attaches to the infant through its 
birth, are appealed to by Origen in support of a doctrine of inborn sinfulness, as 
will presently be seen. 

3 Gen. History of the Christian Religion and Church. E.T., ed. Bohn, vol. 11. 
P- 353- 

+ Cf. Turmel in Revue ahistotre et de littérature relig. vi. p. 19. 
> See Bigg, of. czt. p. 81, n. 1, and p. 83, n. 1. 

8 Strom. vil. 3. In Strom. vii. 16, Clement says: ‘‘ Though men’s actions are 
ten thousand in number, the sources of sin are but two, ignorance and inability. 
And both depend on ourselves; inasmuch as we will not learn, nor, on the other 
hand, restrain lust.” 

7. Strom. iv. ἀμέλει τὸ ἁμαρτάνειν ἐνεργείᾳ κεῖται οὐκ οὐσίᾳ. 8 Strom. vi. 12. 


206 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


~~ 


Though there is a place for faith as a divine gift’, for grace, 
right teaching, and the drawing of the Father’, in effecting 
man’s salvation or τελείωσις, nevertheless the emphasis is 
more generally thrown upon man’s part: “each of us justifies 
himself”; “the true Gnostic creates himself”; men may 
“choose to believe or to disbelieve®.” 

The existence of sin in the world receives, then, for 
Clement of Alexandria, its sufficient explanation in the 
freedom of man’s will. This conception of free-will by no 
means appears for the first time in Clement’s writings; but 
there is much truth in the statement that the Alexandrines, 
and Clement in particular, first defined it and made it the 
foundation of a system‘. Clement’s treatment of the problem 
of Sin furnishes no link in the chain of development of the 
doctrine of the Fall, which was based by Irenaeus on concep- 
tions expressed in the Epistles of S. Paul, and which culmi- 
nated in the great theory of S. Augustine. This Father 
rather represents the logically completed tendency of the 
scanty teaching on the question of sin found in the Apologists 
who preceded Irenaeus; and he unconsciously anticipates, 
in some respects, an attitude which, after the Pelagian 
controversy, came to be pronounced unorthodox. Like the 
Apologists, he held a doctrine of the Fall but no doctrine of 
Original Sin. 


Origen. 


Origen would seem to have held, in the earlier part of 
his life, as individualistic a theory of the universality of sin 
as did his predecessor Clement. He is equally strong, in- 
deed, in his emphasis upon human freedom; but he feels 


1 Strom. lie 4 and 6, ¥. 13, etc. 

2 τῆς θείας χρήζομεν χάριτος, διδασκαλίας τε ὀρθῆς, καὶ εὐπαθείας ἁγνῆς, Kal τῆς 
τοῦ Πατρὸς πρὸς αὐτὸν ὁλκῆς. 

3 These sayings are collected by Dr Bigg, of. εἴΐ. p. 81. Similar ones might 
easily be multiplied: note especially ὁ θεὸς ἡμᾶς ἐξ ἡμῶν αὐτῶν βούλεται σώζεσθαι, 
Strom. Vi. 12. 

4 Bigg, of. cit. p. 78. See also pp. 284 ff. of that work, where the Alex- 
andrian doctrine of free-will is identified with indifferentism, such as Pelagius 
afterwards held, and to which Augustine, its strong opponent, had to resort in the 
case of Adam’s sin. 


xu] 2 the Fathers before Augustine 207 


more acutely than did Clement the inherent sinfulness of 
human nature. Origen’s earliest attempt to explain the 
corrupt state of mankind therefore penetrates more deeply 
beneath the surface of the problem. But it leaves quite out 
of account the organic unity of the race; a fact upon which, 
in its connexion with the universality of sin and death, 
S. Paul had strongly insisted, and on which, as a basis, 
Irenaeus had already founded a doctrine of Original Sin. 

The idea of the human soul having entered this world 
in consequence of a moral fall in the celestial sphere occurs 
in the myth to which Plato resorts, in the P/aedrus, in order 
to describe the soul’s history. And of this fancy of Plato, 
which Philo had previously come near to adopting, Origen 
makes partial use; indeed he sometimes reads it into texts 
of Scripture. Souls, he teaches, are fallen celestial spirits. 
Having become estranged from’God in a former state of 
existence, they were banished to earth and appointed to a 
corporeal life for their purification and restoration. Thus 
each human being brings with him, when born into this 
world, a sinfulness resulting from abuse of free-will in a 
previous existence. 

This theory, destined to find echoes now and again in the 
thought of subsequent centuries, was first imported into 
Christian theology by Origen. 

It is developed in his early work, the De Princzpzis?, 
written before he left Aiexandria for Caesarea. His first 
attempt to account for the universality of sin, therefore, was 
not based upon previous ecclesiastical teaching, ze. upon the 
doctrine of Irenaeus, nor upon exegesis of the fifth chapter 
of S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; the source of his specu- 
lation was the Platonism current in the schools of Alexandria. 
In this same work Origen declares the Fall-story of Genesis 
to be allegorical, and its meaning to be mystical*. This is 


1 It is supplemented by Clement’s ‘‘ vicious theory of the indifferentism of the 
will.” (Bigg, of. σι: p. 199.) 

2 See I. v., vi., vii.; 1. vili. 33 III. v. 4, etc. 

3 Iv.i, 16. Origen also manifests Alexandrian influence in his estimate that 
Adam’s sin was less grave than that of Cain, an opinion expressed in Zu /erem. 
Hom. Xvi. 4 (Bigg, of. εἴζ. p. 205). 


298 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAaP. 


consistent; for his theory of a pre-natal fall does not allow 
of sinfulness being derived in any way from Adam. Equally 
consistent is his condemnation of the “heretical” doctrine 
that man is corrupt by zature, which would make God the 
judge, not of actions, but of natural capacities, in His rewards 
and punishments. The idea that there is accountability 
without liberty is thus repudiated in the De Prinezpiis*. 
Again, it is consistent with the individualistic nature of the 
doctrine of man’s ‘fall’ contained in the De Principiis that 
this work declines to look upon concupiscence as sin until 
voluntary consent has carried the natural desire into action”. 

In that stage of the development of his thought on the 
subject of Sin and the Fall which is represented by the De 
Principiis, Origen must therefore be asserted to have been, 
to a very large extent, a precursor of Pelagius. This does 
not apply, of course, to his views as to grace, but only to 
those concerning the propagation of sin*®. 

This attitude towards the various aspects of the problem 
of Sin, which, whatever else may be said of it, must be avowed 
to be consistent, does not, however, represent the whole of 
Origen’s thought upon the subject. The idea of the in- 
dividual’s pre-mundane fall, and the tendency to treat the 
Paradise-story of Genesis as allegory, are still to be met with 
in his later writings; but along with them we find other ~ 
teaching with which they are by no means perfectly compa- 
tible. It has sometimes been attempted to discover coherency 
underlying Origen’s apparent vacillations and inconsistencies +; 
but these should, perhaps, rather be explained than removed. 
A theory which derives much probability from its general 
agreement with such facts as Eusebius has preserved with 

πο ὅς 

2 III. li. 2,3. Origen says there are certain sins which take their beginning 
from the natural movements of the body ; or, that there are ‘‘ seeds of sins” from 
those things which we use agreeably to nature. These seeds of sin, however, are 
only the occasion of transgression, and are not actually sinful until they are 
allowed to grow beyond what is proper. 

3 Even in this respect Origen stops short of the position of Pelagius; for he 
held that each individual comes into the world in a state of sinfulness, and is not, 
therefore, innocent at birth. But Origen, at this stage, excludes racial solidarity 


in sin as much as did Pelagius afterwards. 
4 e.g. Neander, of. czt. vol. 1. Ὁ: 363. 


xt] 2922 the Fathers before Augustine 200 


reference to the chronological order of Origen’s writings has 
been suggested by Dr Bigg? and adopted by Prof. Harnack?. 
According to this theory, the tendency exhibited in some of 
Origen’s works of later date than the De Princtpizs, in which 
the doctrine of Original Sin is wanting’, not only to believe 
in birth-sin but also to explain it in a way different from 
that employed before, and even in terms of our descent from 
a historical Adam, is due to the fact that, after his departure 
from Alexandria, Origen came in contact with the practice 
of infant baptism at Caesarea: a practice which would 
naturally lead him to consider the question of birth-sin more 
deliberately than before*. Certainly we find in his works 
of the Caesarean period frequent references to a stain of sin 
(sordes peccatt) attaching to every human being and needing 
to be washed away in baptism. Thus, when expounding the 
Law of Purification, Origen finds a-reason for its existence by 
identifying ceremonial uncleanness with impurity to which 
the guilt of sin attaches: an identification suggested by the 
well-known fifth verse of the fifty-first Psalm*. 


ἘΣ ΡΣ ctl. Ὁ. 202. 

* op. cit. vol. Il. p. 365. 

3 Origen’s teaching superficially resembles the Kantian doctrine of ‘radical 
evil,’ but has no connexion with the ecclesiastical doctrine of Original Sin in any of 
its various forms. 

+ So far as the evidence goes, the practice of infant baptism existed before the 
appearance within the Church of any doctrine of a taint inherited by children from 
fallen Adam. The practice does not seem, therefore, to have been at first con- 
nected with, or to have grown out of, a doctrine of Original Sin. On the other 
hand, the existence of the practice, supported as it was by tradition already ancient 
at the beginning of the third century, seems to have been a stimulus to the growth 
of the doctrine, and eventually an argument for its truth. 

5 In Levitt. Hom. Vul. 3. Nunc vero requiramus etiam illud, quid causae sit 
quod mulier quae in hoc mundo nascentibus ministerium praebet, non solum cum 
semen susceperit immunda feri dicitur, sed et cum peperit. Unde et pro purifica- 
tione sua jubetur offerre pullos columbinos, aut turtures pro peccato, ad ostium 
tabernaculi testimonii, ut repropitiet pro ipsa sacerdos; quasi quae repropitia- 
tionem debeat, et purificationem peccati pro eo quod nascenti in hoc mundo 
homini ministerium praebuit. Sic enim scriptum est: ‘ Et repropitiabit pro ipsa 
sacerdos, et mundabitur.’ Ego in talibus nihil audeo dicere, sentio tamen occulta 
in his quaedam mysteria contineri, et esse aliquid latentis arcani, pro quo et 
mulier quae conceperit ex semine, et pepererit, immunda dicatur, et tanquam 
peccati rea offerre jubeatur hostiam pro peccato, et ita purificari. Sed et ille ipse 
qui nascitur, sive virilis, sive feminei sexus sit, pronuntiat de eo Scriptura quia 
non sit ‘mundus a sorde, etiamsi unius diei sit vita ejus.’...... Quod si placet 


300 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [CHAP. 


In the passage last cited, as elsewhere, inborn taint is 
assigned as the reason why baptism is given ‘to infants; 
unless they needed remission, Origen says, their baptism 
would be superfluous. It is very doubtful whether this reason 
for the practice of infant baptism had been given before. 
Irenaeus had not advanced it; Tertullian, though teaching 
a hereditary vztzum origints, was opposed to hastening the 
baptism of young children because they were not as yet 
stained with personal sin. The very texts to which Origen 
appeals for proof of inborn sinful taint had been used by 
Clement of Alexandria, who does not seem to allude to 
infant baptism, in proof that sin did not attach to children 
at their birth ; and this Father only knew the idea of birth-sin 
as a Gnostic tenet. In so far then as Origen appears to have 
held, in his later years, a doctrine of hereditary taint, he 
would seem to have derivéd it, not from ecclesiastical tradi- 
tion or from his exegesis of S. Paul, but primarily from such 
Old Testament verses as Job xiv. 4-5, Psalm li. 5, etc., taken 
in connexion with the Law of Purification on the one hand, 
and the ‘apostolic’ custom of infant baptism on the other. 
Even in commenting on Rom. v. he appeals to this apostolic 
practice, rather than to S. Paul’s statements, in proof of the 
existence in children of a sordes peccatz. 

The exact nature of the ‘stain of sin’ which defiles every 
man born into this world is not rigidly defined by Origen. 
Indeed his expressions with regard to it show that he wavered 


audire quid etiam alli sancti de ista nativitate senserint, audi David dicentem: 
‘In iniquitatibus, inquit, conceptus sum, et in peccatis peperit me mater mea’; 
ostendens quod quaecunque anima in carne nascitur, iniquitatis et peccati sorde 
polluitur....Addi his etiam illud potest, ut requiratur, quid causae sit, cum bap- 
tisma ecclesiae pro remissione peccatorum detur, secundum ecclesiae observan- 
tiam etiam parvulis baptismum dari: cum utique si nihil esset in parvulis, quod 
ad remissionem deberet et indulgentiam pertinere, gratia baptismi superflua 
videretur. 

1 Com. in Rom. v. Pro hoc et ecclesia ab Apostolis traditionem suscepit, 
etiam parvulis baptismum dare; sciebant enim illi, quibus mysteriorum secreta 
commissa sunt divinorum, quod essent in omnibus genuinae sordes peccati, quae 
per aquam et Spiritum ablui deberent; propter quas etiam corpus ipsum corpus 
peccati nominatur, non (ut putant aliqui eorum qui animarum transmigrationem 
in varia corpora introducunt) pro his, quae in alio corpore posita anima deliquerit, 
sed pro hoc ipso, quod in corpore peccati, et corpore mortis et humilitatis 
effecta sit. 


xu] 2, the Fathers before Augustine 5301 


between attributing a physical and a moral character to 
birth-pollution. Sometimes he speaks of it as if it were 
merely a bodily defilement connected with the process of 
birth?; and indeed when the purification of the Virgin Mary 
and the Child Jesus is discussed, Origen clearly distinguishes 
between sordes and peccatum?. 

If sordes could always be taken in the sense in which it is 
used in the passage last quoted, Origen’s doctrine of birth-sin 
would be by no means identical with the later ecclesiastical 
teaching, according to which such sin carries with it personal 
guilt. In other words, Origen would then teach no doctrine 
of Original Guilt. So far he would be in agreement with 
Clement; but on the other hand, in seeing in birth-sin of any 
kind a reason for baptising infants, he would have advanced 
considerably beyond the view of his predecessor in the 
direction of later doctrine?®. 

It is evident, however, from some of the passages cited 
above, that Origen did not always speak as if the sordes 
inherited by every man were solely a physical pollution. He 
sometimes speaks of it as requiring ‘remission’ as well as 


1 In Levit. Hom. Xi. 4. Omnis qui ingreditur hunc mundum, in quadam 
contaminatione effici dicitur. Propter quod et Scriptura dicit: ‘Nemo mundus 
a sorde....’ Hoc ipso ergo quod in vulva matris est positus, et quod materiam 
corporis ab origine paterni seminis sumit, in patre et in matre contaminatus dici 
potest. Aut nescis, quia cum quadraginta dierum factus fuerit puer masculus, 
offertur ad altare, ut ubi purificetur, tanquam qui pollutus fuerit in ipsa concep- 
tione, vel paterni seminis, vel uteri materni? Omnis ergo homo in patre et in 
matre pollutus est, solus vero Jesus Dominus meus in hanc generationem mundus 
ingressus est, in matre non est pollutus. Ingressus est enim corpus incontaminatum. 
Ipse enim erat, quiet dudum per Salomonem dixerat: ‘Magis autem cum essem 
bonus, veni ad corpus incoinquinatum.’ 

2 In Luc. Hom. xiv. Nunc vero in eo quod ait, des purgationts eorum 
(Luke ii. 22), non videtur unum significare, sed alterum, sive plures. Ergo Jesus 
purgatione indiguit, et immundus fuit, aut aliqua sorde pollutus. Temerarie 
forsitan videor dicere, sed Scripturarum auctoritate commotus. Vide quid in Job 
Scriptum est: Memo mundus a sorde.... Non dixit, memo mundus a peccato, sed 
nemo mundus a sorde, Neque enim idipsum significant sordes atque peccata.... 
Omnis anima quae humano corpore fuerit induta, habet sordes suas. 

3 See, e.g., the following passage from Jz Luc. Hom. X1v. Parvuli baptizantur 
in remissionem peccatorum. Quorum peccatorum, vel quo tempore peccaverunt ? 
Aut quomodo potest ulla lavacri in parvulis ratio subsistere, nisi juxta illum 
sensum de quo paulo ante diximus: Mudlus mundus a sorde...et quia per baptismi 
sacramentum nativitatis sordes deponuntur, propterea baptizantur et parvuli. 


302 Lhe Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


cleansing away. It passes then into a corruption involving 
moral guilt, and therefore it must be claimed that, in the 
period which produced the Homzlies on Leviticus and the 
Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Origen had arrived 
at a form of the doctrine of Original Sin. 

But, birth-sin being admitted to be really of the nature 
of sin, and to be more than pollution attaching to physical 
generation, the question of its origin demands an answer. 
The source of inborn sinfulness might be supplied by Origen’s 
theory of a fall of the soul in a previous existence; and 
indeed, in disputing with Celsus, Origen closely connects 
some statements about birth-sin with the notion of an ante- 
natal fall denoted allegorically by Adam’s expulsion from 
Paradise. Thus: “Celsus has not explained how error ac- 
companies the ‘becoming,’ or product of generation...... But 
the prophets, who have given some wise suggestions on the 
subject of things produced by generation, tell us that a 
sacrifice for sin was offered even for new-born infants, as not 
being free from sin. They say, ‘I was shapen in iniquity, 
and in sin did my mother conceive me’; also, ‘They are 
estranged from the womb.’...” 

After also quoting various texts emphasising the vanity 
of material things, such as Rom. viii. 20, Eccles. 1. 2, Ps. xxx1x. 
5, xliv. 25, etc., Origen continues : 

“Tt is a prophet also who says, ‘Thou hast brought us 
down in a place of affliction’; meaning by the ‘place of 
affliction’ this earthly region, to which Adam, that is to 
Say, man, came after he was driven out of paradise for 
sink 

If Origen resorts here to his earliest theory of the origin 
of sin in the individual, we have a case of reversion, de- 
termined, it may be, by the nature of the adversary against 
whom his last work was written. For certainly before the 
date of the Contra Celsum, he had adopted the view that our 
inborn sinfulness was derived from Adam; and that such 
inborn sinfulness is transmitted not merely through what is 
now-a-days called ‘social heredity’ (the fact, that is, that we 


1 Contra Celsum, VII. 50; Eng. tr. Clark, Ante-Nicene Library. 


xu] zz the Fathers before Augustine .508 


are “the sons and disciples of sinners”)!, but in virtue of our 
descent from Adam by generation? 

In his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, written 
apparently between 244 and 249 (which latter date is assigned 
to the Contra Celsum), Origen appears to treat the Fall-story 
as history, and to teach a doctrine of the Fall and of Original 
Sin resembling, with allowance for its greater indefinite- 
ness, that which subsequently reached its developed form in 
S. Augustine. Very little, indeed, is said in this Commentary 
of original sin in its subjective aspect, of a state of corruption 
brought about by the Fall; but such a consequence of the 
first transgression is certainly presupposed, and it is definitely 
stated that our body is the ‘body of sin’ because Adam’s 
children were not born till after his disobedience®. 


Origen observes correctly that S. Paul himself has not 


told us ow “death passed unto all men*.” He regards the 


1 In Rom. v. 

2 It should be mentioned that in one of his earliest works, the Commentary on 
Canticles, Books I-v., Origen regards the fall of Adam and Eve as involving 
their posterity in moral consequences. He would seem, from the former of the 
two passages now to be cited, to have known the Jewish legend, mentioned above 
in Chap. VII., relating to the pollution of Eve by the serpent : 

Cervus quoque amicitiarum quis alius videbitur, nisi ille, qui peremit serpentem 
illum, qui seduxerat Evam et eloquii sui flatibus peccati in eam venena diffundens, 
omnem posteritatis sobolem contagio praevaricationis infecerat, et venit solvere 
inimicitias in carne sua, quas inter Deum et hominem noxius mediator effecerat ? 
Com. in Cant. iii. 

‘Vinea enim Dominus Sabaoth domus Israel est, et domus Juda dilecta 
novella.” Istae ergo vineae cum primo accedunt ad fidem florere dicuntur; cum 
vero per religionem operum suorum suavitate adornantur, odorem suum dedisse 
dicuntur. Non sine causa puto quod non dixerit: odorem dederunt, sed odorem 
suum; ut ostenderet inesse unicuique animae vim possibilitatis et arbitrii libertatem 
qua possit agere omne quod bonum est. Sed quia hoc naturae bonum praevari- 
cationis occasione decerptum, vel ad ignominiam, vel lasciviam fuerat inflexum, 
ubi per gratiam reparatur, et per doctrinam Verbi Dei restituitur, odorem reddit 
sine dubio illum, quem primus conditor Deus indiderat, sed peccati culpa sub- 
traxerat. did. iv. 

3 /n Rom. v. Corpus ergo peccati est corpus nostrum; quia nec Adam 
scribitur cognovisse Evam uxorem suam et genuisse Cain, nisi post peccatum. In 
the sentences which follow, Origen again refers to the law of purification, to the 
texts from Job xiv. and Ps. li., and to the apostolic tradition that baptism should 
be administered to infants. 

4 γί, Quomodo autem in omnes homines pettransierit non ostendit. Videtur 
ergo mihi in his describere Apostolus velut tyranni alicujus ingressum, qui voluerit 
regnum legitimi regis invadere. 


304 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [(ΗΑΡ. 


sin, of which the apostle speaks as ‘entering into the world, 
as subjective, in that he describes it by the word contagio}. 
But there are passages in the Commentary on Romans in 
which a ‘Pelagian’ explanation of the propagation of sin is 
offered*, 

Hence it is obvious that Origen taught, in this work, that 
the first sin was more than the beginning of sin, and that the 
sinfulness of subsequent generations was caused by the sin of 
Adam and its transmitted consequences. 

When we inquire what were the means by which Origen 
regarded these consequences to be transmitted, we meet, in 
the Commentary in question, with the conceptions of (i) the 
inclusion of the race in Adam, (ii) physical heredity. When 
Origen interprets the Fall-story allegorically, he regards 
Adam simply as the type of mankind, after the manner of 
Philo# But when he uses the narrative as actual history, he 
employs the two conceptions which have been mentioned, 
and connects them together by the notion of the race’s 
physical potentiality, or seminal existence, in Adam, its first 


1 In Rom. v. Peccatum enim pertransiit etiam in justos, et levi quadam eos 
contagione perstrinxit. 

2 Jbid. Dedit ergo Adam peccatoribus formam per inobedientiam, Christus 
vero e contrario justis formam per obedientiam posuit,...ut qui obedientiae ejus 
sequuntur exemplum justi constituantur ab ipsa justitia, sicut illi inobedientiae 
formam sequentes, constituti sunt peccatores. 

3 ** For as those whose business it is to defend the doctrine of providence do so 
by means of arguments which are not to be despised, so also the subjects of Adam 
and his son will be philosophically dealt with by those who are aware that in the 
Hebrew language Adam signifies man; and that in those parts of the narrative 
which appear to refer to Adam as an individual, Moses is discoursing upon the 
nature of man in general (φυσιολογεῖ Mwiiojs τὰ περὶ τῆς Tod ἀνθρώπου φύσεως). 
For ‘‘in Adam” (as the Scripture says) ‘‘all die,” and were condemned in the 
likeness of Adam’s transgression, the word of God asserting this not so much of 
one particular individual as of the whole human race. For in the connected 
series of statements which appears to apply as to one particular individual, the 
curse pronounced upon Adam is regarded as common to all [the members of the 
race], and what was spoken with reference to the woman is spoken of every 
woman without exception. And the expulsion of the man and woman from 
Paradise, and their being clothed with tunics of skins (which God, because of the 
transgression of men, made for those who had sinned), contain a certain secret and 
mystical doctrine (far transcending that of Plato) of the soul losing its wings, and 
being borne downwards to earth, until it can lay hold of some stable resting-place.”’ 
C. Celsum, IV. 40; Eng. tr. Clark, Azte- Nicene Library. 


x11] 22 the Fathers before Augustine 5305 


father. He here borrows from the author of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews that writer’s conception of Levi paying tithes to 
Melchisedek while yet in the loins of Abraham’. The bare 
identity of. the race with Adam, without further definition as 
to mode, occurs in a much earlier work”. But the particular 
idea of race-unity of which Origen makes use, that, namely, 
of the seminal presence, in Adam, of all his posterity, appears 
here for the first time. Irenaeus, guided by S. Paul’s in- 
definite and mystical conception of the solidarity of mankind 
with Adam, had stopped far short of so concrete and definite 
a notion as this which was suggested by the Epistle to the 
Hebrews. In this respect Origen makes a new departure 
in Christian speculation. So does he also in his conception 
of sordes peccati, the probable sources of which have already 
been mentioned. It is interesting to find, thus early in the 
Eastern Church, a precursor, in ‘some important points, of 
S. Augustine: the more so because, though he owes some- 
thing to S. Paul, he shows no sign of influence from Irenaeus 


1 In Rom. v.; Migne, P.G. XIV. toog. Et primo videamus quomodo ‘ per 
unum hominem peccatum introivit in hunc mundum, et per peccatum mors.’ 
Fortassis enim requirat aliquis si ante Adam mulier peccavit,...et rursum ante 
ipsam peccavit serpens...... Sed vide in his Apostolum naturae ordinem tenuisse, 
et ideo quoniam de peccato loquebatur, ex quo mors in omnes homines pertransi- 
erat, successionem posteritatis humanae quae hine morti succubuit ex peccato 
venienti, non mulieri ascribit, sed viro. Non enim ex muliere posteritas, sed ex 
viro nominatur...; et ob hoc mortalis posteritas, et corporalis successio, viro 
potius tanquam auctori, et non mulieri deputatur. Sed ut adhuc evidentius 
fiat quod dicimus, addemus etiam hoc quod idem Apostolus ad Hebraeos scribit : 
‘Sed et Levi qui decimas accepit, decimatus est. Adhuc enim in lumbis 
patris erat cum obviavit ei Melchisedech regresso a caede regum.’ Si ergo Levi, 
qui generatione quarta post Abraham nascitur, in lumbis Abrahae fuisse perhi- 
betur, multo magis omnes homines qui in hoc mundo nascuntur, et nati sunt, 
in lumbis erant Adae, cum adhuc esset in paradiso; et omnes homines cum 
ipso vel in ipso expulsi sunt de paradiso, cum ipse inde depulsus est; et per 
ipsum mors, quae ei ex praevaricatione venerat, consequenter et in eos pertransiit 
qui in lumbis ejus habebantur...... Neque ergo ex serpente...neque ex muliere..., 
sed per Adam ex quo omnes mortales originem ducunt, dicitur introisse peccatum, 
et per peccatum mors. 

2 Comm in Joann. Xx. 21. Inspice vero etiam hoc: ‘In Adam omnes 
moriuntur...’ et videbis vitam hominis qui est ad imaginem ; Ccujus vita considerata, 
intelliges quonam pacto homicida ille interfecerit viventem hominem; recte 
dicendus homicida, non quia unum quempiam privatim interfecerit, sed propter 
universum genus a se interfectum; unde in Adam omnes moriuntur. 


abe ᾿ 20 


306 Lhe Doctrine of the Fall etc. [CHAP. XII 


or Tertullian, in his speculation on the Fall and the cause of 
human sinfulness. And it is the more important to emphasise 
this side of Origen’s teaching because he is generally re- 
membered rather for the very different, if not incompatible, — 
line of thought, expressed in his theory of a pre-mundane 
fall of man. 


{ΓΙ make SME 


THE DOCTRINES OF THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
IN THE FATHERS BEFORE AUGUSTINE (continued). 


V. METHODIUS, ATHANASIUS AND CYRIL OF JERUSALEM. 


IN Origen’s writings, it has been shown, there are to be 
found two diverse lines of thought with regard to the origin 
and universal spread of human sin. The one of these, 
suggested by passages of Holy Scripture and by a traditional 
Christian practice, anticipates certain fundamental points 
included in the later orthodox doctrine of Original Sin. The 
other represents mere speculation inspired by Platonic myth 
and the allegorical interpretation of Scripture current in the 
school of Alexandria. Of these two elements, which were 
incompatible with each other, the former would seem to 
have made little or no impression upon the teaching of the 
Eastern Fathers immediately succeeding Origen; and the 
positive influence of the latter, discernible perhaps in certain 
notions entertained with regard to man’s original estate, was 
confined to the Cappadocian theology. The negative influence 
of the great Alexandrian’s doctrine of a pre-mundane fall, 
however, is perhaps traceable in the unwillingness of all 
subsequent Fathers of the East readily and wholly to accept 
such definite teaching as to the consequences of the sin of 
Adam as was now being shaped and propagated in Western 
Christendom. The attitude towards these speculations of 
Origen with which we first meet in studying the history of 
Greek patristic thought on the subject of human sinfulness, is 


PHOS ὦ 


308 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [CHAP. 


one of reaction; of reaction, not, indeed, in the direction of 
the doctrine of Tertullian or Augustine, but in the sense of a 
return to literal interpretation of the Fall-story of Genesis and 
to the indefinite categories which characterised the thought 
of Irenaeus, and even earlier Greek writers, with regard to 
sin. 

The most influential teachers of the Eastern Church for a 
century or so after Origen were Methodius and Athanasius. 
To these, particularly to the former of them, and also to Cyril 
of Jerusalem, the concluding remarks of the preceding para- 
graph are to be taken to apply. These Fathers, though 
rejecting Origen’s speculations in their treatment of the 
problem of Sin, did not at all develope, so far as definiteness 
of expression is concerned, that side of his teaching which 
tended in the direction of later ecclesiastical orthodoxy. 
Methodius was an avowed and determined opponent of 
Origen; Athanasius, though educated in Alexandria, gradually 
threw aside more and more of the influence of Origen which 
he had there received, and left his great predecessor’s specula- 
tions on ante-natal sin severely alone. Cyril may be men- 
tioned in this place because he resembles the other two writers 
about to be discussed in receding from the stage of precision 
in thought and language with regard to the origin of human 
sinfulness which had previously been reached by Origen, 
rather than carrying such thought nearer to the definite and 
systematic formulation which it was soon elsewhere to receive. 


Methodius. 


Though an opponent of Origen’s Platonism, Methodius 
was nevertheless himself somewhat of a Platonist. He also 
leaned much upon the Alexandrian Book of Wisdom, especially 
in his description of the Fall. His anti-Origenism, which, by 


1 See Bonwetsch, Methodius von Olympus, 1. Schriften, S. 50, 51. 

Methodius identifies the serpent of Gen. iii. with Satan, and, in adopting the 
teaching of Wisdom, according to which envy was the devil’s motive in tempting 
Eve, he embellishes his account after the manner of Jewish haggada. (See Bp. Bull’s 
Works, vol. 11. p. 297.) He also mentions, after the Alexandrian apocalyptic 
work Slavonic Enoch, that Adam, before the Fall, had vision of the angels and of 
Wisdom. See Bonwetsch, of. ctt. S. 75. 


xu] 7 the Fathers before Augustine 300 


the way, leads him to abandon the Hellenism of the Book of 
Wisdom so far as to deny that the body is a fetter to the 
soul}, is revealed in his repeated insistence on the fact that 
Adam was ‘in the flesh’ when he sinned’, in his frequent 
denial that the ‘coats of skins’ signified human bodies, and in 
his repudiation of the notion that Paradise was in heaven’, 
and that Adam had been banished thence to earth. Sin, 
Methodius repeatedly affirms, is wrought through the flesh‘. 

In the place of this Origenist teaching which he destruc- 
tively criticises, Methodius gives us little that is positive. He 
maintains, like the Greek Fathers generally, that since the 
Fall man’s freedom of will is not diminished®. He holds 
indeed that the Fall brought physical consequences to man- 
kind®, including death—for man was created immortal’. In 
this latter connexion he quotes S. Paul (1 Cor. xv. 22), ina 
passage in which he uses, and moreover developes, the Re- 
capitulation-doctrine of Irenaeus*. 

From the passages cited below, in illustration of the last 
statement, it will be seen that Methodius was anxious to 


1 op. cit. S. 116, and passim. A ΑΙ 52175. 
EET FASS GPP *  Lbids S. 76,77 + 196 


Se /ozda, S. 46, 177, etc. 

δ Jbid. S. 74, etc. In Methodius we find the curious idea that man was 
banished from the tree of life in order that sin might be killed in him before his 
resurrection ; /ézd@. 5. 136. 

* Conviv. dec. virg. IX. 2. 

8 ταύτῃ yap Tov ἄνθρωπον ἀνείληφεν ὁ λόγος, ὅπως δὴ St αὐτοῦ καταλύσῃ τὴν ἐπ᾽ 
ὀλέθρῳ γεγονυῖαν καταδίκην, ἡττήσας τὸν ὄφιν, ἥρμοζε γὰρ μὴ δὲ ἑτέρου νικηθῆναι 
τὸν πονηρὸν ἀλλὰ δι᾿ ἐκείνου, ὃν δὴ καὶ ἐκόμπαζεν ἀπατήσας αὐτὸν τετυραννηκέναι, 
ὅτι μὴ ἄλλως τὴν ἁμαρτίαν λυθῆναι καὶ τὴν κατάκρισιν δυνατὸν ἦν, εἰ μὴ πάλιν ὁ 
αὐτὸς ἐκεῖνος ἄνθρωπος, δι᾿ ὃν εἴρητο τὸ “᾿ γῆ el καὶ εἰς γῆν ἀπελεύσῃ," ἀναπλασθεὶς 
ἀνέλυσε τὴν ἀπόφασιν τὴν δι᾿ αὐτὸν εἰς πάντας ἐξενηνεγμένην. ὅπως, καθὼς ἐν τῷ 
᾿Αδὰμ πρότερον πάντες ἀποθνήσκουσιν, οὕτω δὴ πάλιν καὶ ἐν τῷ ἀνειληφότι Χριστῷ 
τὸν “Adau πάντες ζωοποιηθῶσιν. bid. 111. 6. 

Cf. Il. 4. φέρε γὰρ ἡμεῖς ἐπισκεψώμεθα πῶς ὀρθοδόξως ἀνήγαγε τὸν ᾿Αδὰμ els 
τὸν Χριστόν, οὐ μόνον τύπον αὐτὸν ἡγούμενος εἷναι καὶ εἰκόνα, ἀλλὰ καὶ αὐτὸ τοῦτο 
Χριστὸν καὶ αὐτὸν γεγονέναι διὰ τὸ τὸν πρὸ αἰώνων εἰς αὐτὸν ἐγκατασκῆψαι λόγον. 
ἥρμοζε γὰρ τὸ πρωτόγονον τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ πρῶτον βλάστημα καὶ μονογενὲς τὴν σοφίαν 
τῷ πρωτοπλάστῳ καὶ πρώτῳ καὶ πρωτογόνῳ τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἀνθρώπῳ κερασθεῖσαν 
ἐνηνθρωπηκέναι, τοῦτο γὰρ εἶναι τὸν Χριστόν, ἄνθρωπον ἐν ἀκράτῳ θεότητι καὶ τελείᾳ 
πεπληρωμένον καὶ θεὸν ἐν ἀνθρώπῳ κεχωρημένον: ἣν γὰρ πρεπωδέστατον τὸν 
πρεσβύτατον τῶν αἰώνων καὶ πρῶτον ἀρχαγγέλων, ἀνθρώποις μέλλοντα συνομιλεῖν, 
εἰς τὸν πρεσβύτατον καὶ πρῶτον τῶν ἀνθρώπων εἰσοικισθῆναι Tov ᾿Αδαμ.. 


310 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [CHAP. 


retain the literal or historical sense of Gen. ili. against Origen’s 
allegorical interpretation of the narrative contained in it, and 
that, to do so, he resorted to a kind of realism such as had 
already served the purpose of Irenaeus. Adam stood for the 
whole race in its natural and imperfect state. The same 
undefined solidarity of mankind with Adam is implied in the 
words: “the Paradise out of which we were driven through 
the protoplast!” Such language does not express any definite 
theory of our relation to Adam such as is implied, for instance, 
in Origen’s conception of the race’s potential (seminal) exist- 
ence in its first father; it rather recalls the vaguer language 
of earlier times with its several possible but undifferentiated 
meanings. 

Methodius is equally indefinite in his conception of inherent 
sinfulness and its cause. “When man had disobeyed,” he 
writes, “sin established its seat in him. Deprived of the 
divine breath, we have since that time been at the mercy of 
the passions which the serpent put in us®.” This is the 
nearest approach he makes to the doctrine of inherited taint 
derived from fallen Adam. His doctrine of redemption from 
a state of φθοραϑ is not expressed in terms of such inherited 
tendency to evil; φθορά describes an ethical state without 
specifying anything as to the derivation or mode of diffusion 
of the state. We cannot discover, in short, in the extant 
writings of Methodius, any link between the position already 
reached in the East by Origen and the more highly elaborated 
theory of Original Sin which is especially associated with the 
name of S. Augustine. 


Athanastus. 


In treating of Sin and Redemption, Athanasius, like Me- 
thodius, makes use of the predominantly ethical category 
φθορα, which is indefinite in its significance for anthropological 
doctrine. This word apparently describes, in the writings of 
Athanasius, man’s “natural” state, of which this Father held 
an estimate lower than that of his predecessors. The race of 

1 Bonwetsch, of. cit. S. 170. 


2 Preserved in Eusebius, Haez. lxiv. 6o. 
3 Conviv. dec. virg. 111. 7, etc. 


xi} 22 the Fathers before Augustine 311 


men, according to his teaching, would not have had from the 
first, and in virtue of their own nature, the power of “continu- 
ing always’. Man, indeed, is “mortal by nature?,” or “ cor- 
ruptible by nature®.”. Mankind might have avoided what was 
according to nature had they remained good or incorruptible, 
and might have escaped the state of corruption by retaining 
the “virtue of (God’s) own Word, so that, possessing, as it 
were, certain reflections of the Word, and becoming rational, 
they might be capable of continuing in happiness, living the 
true life, and actually that of the saints in Paradise*.” 

This ‘natural state’ of man is, of course, quite different 
from the primitive or unfallen state. The life for which man 
was destined from the first was, for Athanasius to a much 
greater extent than for the Greek Fathers in general, the 
outcome of divine grace, or of superadded divine gifts. Asa 
natural’ being man is quite unable to maintain his proper 
relation to God, according to the teaching of Athanasius ; but 
in virtue of creation after the divine image (εἰκών) he is 
enabled to do so. 

The Fall is conceived by Athanasius as a lapse of mankind 
to the ‘natural state.’ In other words, the Fall is represented 
as consisting in the loss of what more modern theology has 
called supernatural endowments®. From the first transgression 


-\ 


1 De Incarn. 3. ἐν ols πρὸ πάντων τῶν ἐπὶ γῆς τὸ ἀνθρώπων γένος ἐλεήσας, καὶ 
θεωρήσας ὡς οὐχ ἱκανὸν εἴη κατὰ τὸν τῆς ἰδίας γενέσεως λόγον διαμένειν ἀεί... ... 

2 bid. 4. “Ἔστι μὲν γὰρ κατὰ φύσιν ἄνθρωπος θνητός. 

3 /bid, 5. κατὰ φύσιν φθαρτοί. 

These statements in the De 7πεαγ7ι.. need, however, to be qualified by others 
occurring elsewhere in the writings of Athanasius, and even in the De /ncarn. 
itself. See, on this subject, Harnack, Astory of Dogma, E. T. vol. 111. p. 273. 

4 De Incarn. 3. 

5 The distinction between the natural and supernatural constituents of man 
was variously drawn in Athanasius’ time; they are not always clearly distinguished 
by Athanasius himself. ᾿ 

6 De Incarn. 4. Οὕτως μὲν οὖν ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον πεποίηκε, καὶ μένειν 
ἠθέλησεν ἐν ἀφθαρσίᾳ: ἄνθρωποι δὲ κατολιγωρήσαντες καὶ ἀποστραφέντες τὴν πρὸς 
τὸν θεὸν κατανόησιν, λογισάμενοι δὲ καὶ ἐπινοήσαντες ἑαυτοῖς τὴν κακίαν, ὥσπερ ἐν 
τοῖς πρώτοις ἐλέχθη, ἔσχον τὴν προαπειληθεῖσαν τοῦ θανάτου κατάκρισιν, καὶ λοιπὸν 
οὐκ ἔτι, ὡς γεγόνασι, διέμενον" ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἐλογίζοντο, διεφθείροντο" καὶ ὁ θάνατος 
αὐτῶν ἐκράτει βασιλεύων. Ἢ γὰρ παράβασις τῆς ἐντολῆς εἰς τὸ κατὰ φύσιν αὐτοὺς 
ἐπέστρεφεν... 

Ibid. 7. Ei μὲν οὖν μόνον ἣν πλημμέλημα καὶ μὴ φθορᾶς ἐπακολούθησις, καλῶς 


312 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [| CHAP. 


onwards, mankind have been reduced to the condition of 
nature above which they were originally raised by the ψυχὴ 
λογική, Which, though in some of its aspects regarded as a 
natural endowment, is nevertheless rather a superadded gift 
ef grace. In this state of nature, into which Adam fell, all 
subsequent generations have been born. But this universal 
fall does not seem to be ascribed definitely to the one great 
sin of Adam, so that all the race sinned in him or with him, 
or were constituted sinners in consequence of his transgression 
and independently of their own actual sins. On the contrary, 
Athanasius regards the fallen state of the race as a whole as 
having been brought about gradually’. 


ἂν nv ἡ μετάνοια. Ei δὲ ἅπαξ προλαβούσης τῆς παραβάσεως, εἰς τὴν κατὰ φύσιν 
φθορὰν ἐκρατοῦντο οἱ ἄνθρωποι, καὶ τὴν τοῦ κατ᾽ εἰκόνα χάριν ἀφαιρεθέντες ἦσαν, τί 
ἄλλο ἔδει γενέσθαι; 

1 See De Jncarn. 3, and cf. C. Arian. τι. 68. Ὃ ᾿Αδὰμ πρὸ τῆς παραβάσεως 
ἔξωθεν ἦν, λαβὼν τὴν χάριν καὶ μὴ συνηρμοσμένην ἔχων αὐτὴν τῷ σώματι. 

2 De Incarn. 6. Διὰ δὴ ταῦτα πλεῖον τοῦ θανάτου κρατήσαντος, καὶ τῆς φθορᾶς 
παραμενούσης κατὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων, τὸ μὲν τῶν ἀνθρώπων γένος ἐφθείρετο ὁ δὲ 
λογικὸς καὶ κατ᾽ εἰκόνα γενόμενος ἄνθρωπος ἠφανίζετο. (Note tenses.) 

Ch. 5 of this same treatise also serves as an illustration of the statement asserted 
above. The following sentences may be cited from it, the translation being that 
of Robertson in the Lzbrary of Nicene and 2. Nicene Fathers: ‘* For God has not 
only made us out of nothing; but He gave us freely, by the grace of the Word, 
a life in correspondence with God. But men, having rejected things eternal, and, 
by the counsel of the devil, turned to the things of corruption, became the cause 
of their own corruption in death, being, as I said before, by nature corruptible, 
but destined, by the grace following from partaking of the Word, to have escaped 
their natural state, had they remained good. For because of the Word dwelling 
with them, even their natural corruption did not come near them, as Wisdom also 
says: ‘*God made man for incorruption, and as an image of His own eternity; 
but by the envy of the devil death came into the world.” But when this was 
come to pass, men began to die, while corruption thenceforward prevailed against 
them, gaining even more than its natural power over the whole race, inasmuch as 
it had, owing to the transgression of the commandment, the threat of the Deity as 
a further advantage against them. For even in their misdeeds men had not 
stopped short at any set limits; but gradually pressing forward, have passed on 
beyond all measure ;. having, to begin with, been inventors of wickedness and 
called down upon themselves death and corruption; while later on, having 
turned aside to wrong and exceeding all Jawlessness, and stopping at no one evil 
but devising all manner of new evils in succession, they have become insatiable in 
sinning.” 

This citation embodies, perhaps, all the essential features of Athanasius’ 
teaching as to the Fall. It also serves to suggest that his doctrine of the state 


of φθορά was, at least in part, derived from Pseudo-Solomon’s use of θάνατος in an 
ethical sense. 


x11] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 313 


The transgression of Adam does not seem, therefore, to 
have been always regarded by Athanasius “as forming a 
tremendous cleavage” in human history. “That was not the 
characteristic view of Athanasius,” Prof. Harnack says!; 
certainly it is not the view characteristic of the De /ucarnatione. 

In other writings of this Father, however, we meet with 
expressions which bespeak a nearer approach to the later 
doctrine of Original Sin. Athanasius was by no means ‘a 
Pelagian before Pelagius.’ Although his language lacks the 
precision of that of later, and indeed of some earlier, Fathers, 
so that it is difficult to ascertain ow, precisely, he conceived 
sin to be propagated, or the race to be related to Adam and 
to be concerned in Adam’s sin, he nevertheless is more 
explicit than, for instance, Methodius. He certainly held 
that, in some sense, Adam’s sin passed over to us. He taught 
that Christ’s sacrifice was offered “that He might make all 
men upright and free from the old transgression?.’ In one 
passage he says that Adam’s sin was made to spread over all 
by the devil*; a unique way of expressing the propagation of 
original sin, and one which embodies only the smaller half of 
the Augustinian theory on the point. More usually he 
expresses himself in more general terms, which do not specify 
the precise mode in which Adam’s sin passed to his posterity *. 
If any such mode is implied at all, it is perhaps that of ordinary 
inheritance by means of physical descent. This certainly 
appears to be the implication of one or two passages in the 
writings of Athanasius®, though it is never very explicitly 
expressed. | 

1 Op. cit. p. 274. Perhaps this opinion receives confirmation from the oc- 
currence, in the writings of Athanasius, of statements to the effect that some 
individual men have existed who were free from sin; see C. gentes 2, C. Arian. 
III. 33, and cf. 1. 39. But possibly actual sin alone was, in these cases, before the 
writer's mind, 

2 De Incarn. 20; ἐλευθέρους τῆς ἀρχαίας παραβάσεως. In C. Apollin. 1. 15, 
he says: ‘‘ human nature arises in sin and receives the consequences of sin.” 

elias tl. 0. 

4 ee. C. Arian. 1. 51. τοῦ ᾿Αδὰμ παραβάντος, εἰς πάντας τοὺς ἀνθρώπους 
ἔφθασεν ἡ ἁμαρτία; cf. Expos. in Ps. xv. 8, ‘*Through Adam’s sin were we 
banished from God’s face”; C. Arian. 11. 60, ‘All men were lost through his 
sin”’; and see zzd. 1. 41, De Trin. et Spiritu Sanct. 21. 


5 C. Apoll. 1. 15, cited above; C. Arian. 11. 14, “ Before we were, we were 
subject to the curse of the law and to corruption.” See also Expos. 17 Ps. li. 


314 The Doctrine of the Fall etc.  [CHAP. 


("Similar deficiency of explicitness usually attaches to this 

Father’s language as to our solidarity in Adam. Athanasius 
often speaks as if Adam were, in some sense, the sum of all 
men: “We all die in Adam!”; “God had turned away from 
human nature because of its transgression of the law in 
Adam?” And once or twice he seems to have expressed 
this solidarity in terms of the conception of the race’s 
potential inclusion in Adam, the first parent of the race 
being, as it were, the seed inclosing the race in embryo. 
Thus he says: “ Although Adam alone was formed out of 
the earth, yet in him were the grounds of the succession of 
the whole race*.” Our birth in continuous descent from 
jAdam is also emphasised‘. 

These citations will suffice to show that Athanasius held 
some of the more important ideas essential to the doctrine 
of Original Sin derived from Adam, but in relatively un- 
developed form. His teaching on the subject differs from 
that later formulated by Augustine chiefly by his lack of 
emphasis on the subjective or psychological aspect of original 
sin, and the absence of any identification of it with con- 
cupiscence or a disturbance of man’s nature’. 


Cyril of Jerusalem. 


In connexion with the doctrine of the two Fathers with 
whom we have last been concerned, a few illustrations may 
be given of the teaching, with regard to the Fall and its 
consequences, of another representative of Pre-Augustinian 
thought in the Eastern Church, who is more naturally 
associated with Methodius and Athanasius than with either 
of the two groups of oriental writers which still remain 
to be mentioned. 


C. Arian. 1. 59. 
Expos. in Ps. \xviii. 18. 
C. Arian. i. 48. Elyap καὶ ὁ ᾿Αδὰμ ἐκ τῆς γῆς μόνος ἐπλάσθη, ἀλλ᾽ ἐν αὐτῷ 
ἦσαν οἱ λόγοι τῆς διαδοχῆς παντὸς τοῦ γένους. 

4 De decr. Nic. syn. 8; see also C. Arian. Iv. 30. 

5 The writer would here acknowledge his indebtedness, in collecting some of 
the references given above, to the monographs on S. Athanasius and his doctrine 
published by the German scholars Stater and Pell. 


1 
9 
“ 
a 
© 


ΧΙ] 72. the Fathers before Augustine 5315 


Cyril was less directly concerned with the doctrines here 
under discussion than even Methodius or Athanasius. His 
allusions to their subject-matter are yet more fragmentary 
and more incidental. 

He clearly recognises one of the universal consequences 
of Adam’s fall: 

“ And yet one man’s sin, even Adam’s, had power to bring 
death into the world; but if by one man’s offence death 
reigned over the world, how shall not life much rather reign 
by the righteousness of One?... 

“Tf the first man formed out of the earth brought in 
universal death, shall not He who formed him out of the 
earth bring in everlasting life, being Himself life!?” 

This passage only refers to physical death. As regards 
sin, however, Cyril further recognises that our first parent’s 
transgression was also ours. THe universality of sin, upon 
which he sometimes comments”, is in one or two places 
associated with the Fall. Thus, after mentioning Adam’s 
temptation and sin, Cyril writes: 

“What then? some will say. We have been seduced and 
are lost; is there no chance of salvation? We have fallen... 
We have been blinded...We have been crippled...In a word 
we are dead®.” | 

And again, after speaking of the universality of sin, he 
says, in connexion with the Fall, “ Very great was the wound 
of our nature4”’ 

These passages, however, do not specify by what process, 
or in what respects, our nature was affected by our first 
parent’s sin. There is likewise no explanation of our 
solidarity in Adam or in the consequences of his sin, nor 
any reference to inborn taint. Indeed Cyril of Jerusalem, 
after the manner of Clement of Alexandria, seems not to 
recognise any such hereditary bias to evil in man, and he 
identifies human corruption with personal sin®. So also in 


1 Cat. ΧΙΠ. 2, Eng. tr. Library of the Fathers, Oxford. 

ΧΙ Ὁ 07 Εἴς; 

ADT Fa aS ἘΣ KIL. ἢ: 

5 Jbid. τν. 19. ᾿Ελθόντες εἰς τόνδε τὸν κόσμον ἀναμάρτητοι, νῦν ἐκ προαιρέσεως 
ἁμαρτάνομεν. Cf. XIII. I. 


316 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


treating of the sacrament of Baptism, it is only actual or 
personal sin of whose remission he speaks. He represents 
our life as beginning in a state of innocence, and our free- 
will as unimpaired’. It may be that he thus intends merely 
to set aside Origen’s speculations as to a fall in a previous 
state of existence; but in any case his expressions are very 
unguarded for a writer subsequent to Origen, and seem to 
imply scanty recognition, on his part, of the tendencies of 
the thought οἵ his time with regard to inborn sinfulness and 
the far-reaching consequences of the first transgression. 


VI. THE CAPPADOCIANS. 
Basil. 


Basil’s utterances with regard to the Fall and its con- 
sequences are neither numerous nor important. They serve, 
however, to illustrate a stage in the development from the 
position of Athanasius to that of Gregory of Nyssa, who best 
represents the tendencies of Cappadocian theology. 

Basil’s writings witness to the growth, taking place during 
the period in which he lived, of the doctrine of man’s primitive 
state; also to the permanent incorporation into Christian 
tradition of the Jewish legend as to ‘the envy of the devil.’ 
It was the angelic dignity of unfallen man which, according 
to this Father’s embellishment of the bare statement of the 
Book of Wisdom, excited Satan’s jealousy”. 

The unfallen state of grace, which man _ has forfeited 
through sin, is the state also to which redemption is to bring 
us. Redemption, in fact, is regarded as a rescue from the 
effects of the Fall. Thus: 

“The dispensation of God and our Saviour towards man 
is the recalling him from the Fall, and his return into the 


1 bid. WW. 21. Αὐτεξούσιός ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή, Kal ὁ διάβολος τὸ μὲν ὑποβάλλειν 
δύναται" τὸ δὲ καὶ ἀναγκάσαι παρὰ προαίρεσιν οὐκ ἔχει τὴν ἐξουσίαν. 

1 Quod Deus non est auctor mali, 6. ᾿Ορῶν γὰρ ἑαυτὸν ἐκ τῶν ἀγγέλων καταῤ- 
ῥιφέντα, οὐκ ἔφερε βλέπειν τὸν γήϊνον ἐπὶ τὴν ἀξίαν τῶν ἀγγέλων διὰ προκοπῆς 
ἀνυψούμενον. See also a passage of greater fulness, quoted by Bp. Bull, Words, 
vol. 11. p. 299, from Basil, ed. Paris, 1638, tom. I. p. 468. 


xu] 2, the Fathers before Augustine 517 


friendship of God from that estrangement which sin had 
caused'.” 


Again Basil teaches that the Holy Spirit “renews us and 
makes us again the image of God; and by the laver of 
regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost, we are 
adopted to the Lord, and the new creature again partakes 
of the Spirit, of which being deprived, it had waxed old. 
And thus man becomes again the image of God, who had 


fallen from the divine similitude, and was become like the 
beasts that perish®.” 


This passage implies, of course, that Adam’s sin affected 
all his posterity, in that the divine image was lost once and 
for all by man when Adam fell. Elsewhere Basil states that 
Adam transmitted death’, and also sin‘, to mankind; indeed 


our first parent’s transgression is imputed to all and makes 
all men actual sinners’. 


Beyond this, however, Basil does not carry us. He never 
defines more precisely the mode in which our solidarity with 


1 De Spiritu Sancto, c. 15. Migne, P.G. XXXII. 128. ‘H rod θεοῦ Καὶ 
Σωτῆρος ἡμῶν περὶ τὸν ἄνθρωπον οἰκονομία ἀνάκλησίς ἐστιν ἀπὸ THs ἐκπτώσεως, 
καὶ ἐπάνοδος εἰς οἰκείωσιν θεοῦ ἀπὸ τῆς διὰ τὴν παρακοὴν γενομένης ἀλλοτριώσεως. 
Διὰ τοῦτο ἡ μετὰ σαρκὸς ἐπιδημία Χριστοῦ, αἱ τῶν εὐαγγελικών πολιτευμάτων 
ὑποτυπώσεις, τὰ πάθη, ὁ σταυρός, ἡ ταφή, ἡ ἀνάστασις." ὥστε τὸν σωζόμενον 
ἄνθρωπον διὰ μιμήσεως Χριστοῦ τὴν ἀρχαίαν ἐκείνην υἱοθεσίαν ἀπολαβεῖν. With the 
teaching here given cf. that of Athanasius, De /ucarn. cc. 4 and 8. 

2 Adv. Eunomium (quoted by Bull, of. ct. p. 329). Ἔν ἁγιασμῷ τοῦ 
Πνεύματος ἐκλήθημεν, ws ὁ ἀπόστολος διδάσκει, τοῦτο ἡμᾶς ἀνακαινοῖ, καὶ πάλιν 
εἰκόνας ἀναδείκνυσι θεοῦ, διὰ λουτροῦ παλιγγενεσίας, καὶ ἀνακαινώσεως Πνεύματος 
ἁγίου υἱοθετούμεθα Ἰζυρίῳ: καινὴ πάλιν κτίσις μεταλαμβάνουσα τοῦ Πνεύματος, 
οὗπερ ἐστερημένη πεπαλαίωτο, εἰκὼν πάλιν θεοῦ ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἐκπεσὼν τῆς ὁμοιότητος 
τῆς θείας, καὶ παρασυμβληθεὶς κτήνεσιν ἀνόητος καὶ ὁμοιωθεὶς αὐτοῖς. 

3 Sermo de renunt, saecult, 7 (Μ. ΧΧΧΙ. 640). Αὕτη (γαστριμαργία) τὸν 
᾿Αδὰμ θανάτῳ παρέδωκε, καὶ τῷ κόσμῳ συντέλειαν ἐπήγαγε διὰ τὴν τῆς γαστρὸς 
ἡδονήν. 

4. Homil. in famem et sicc., c. 7. ὡς γὰρ ᾿Αδὰμ κακῶς φαγὼν τὴν ἁμαρτίαν 
παρέπεμψεν. 

5 Epist. CCLXI. 2. Migne, ?.G. XXXII. 969. Ei γὰρ ἄλλο μὲν ἣν τὸ 
βασιλευόμενον ὑπὸ τοῦ θανάτου, ἄλλο δὲ τὸ παρὰ τοῦ Κυρίου προσληφθέν, οὐκ ἂν 
μὲν ἐπαύσατο τὰ ἑαυτοῦ ἐνεργῶν ὁ θάνατος" οὐκ ἂν δὲ ἡμέτερον κέρδος ἐγένετο τῆς 
σαρκὸς τῆς θεοφόρου τὰ πάθη: οὐκ ἀπέκτεινε δὲ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν ἐν τῇ σαρκί: οὐκ 
ἐζωοποιήθημεν ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ οἱ ἐν τῷ ᾿Αδὰμ ἀποθανόντες: οὐκ ἀνεπλάσθη τὸ 
διαπεπτωκός: οὐκ ἀνωρθώθη τὸ κατεῤῥαγμένον: οὐ προσῳκειώθη τῷ θεῷ τὸ διὰ τῆς 
ἀπάτης τοῦ ὄφεως ἀλλοτριωθέν....τίς δὲ χρεία τῆς ἁγίας Παρθένου, εἰ μὴ ἐκ τοῦ 
φυράματος τοῦ Addu ἔμελλεν ἡ θεοφόρος σὰρξ προσλαμβάνεσθαι. 


318 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. (CHAP. 


Adam is to be conceived, the nature of the ‘sin’ which he 
vaguely states to have been ‘transmitted, nor the means 
by which such transmission was actually effected. As to 
hereditary taint, or inheritance of a corrupted nature, he 
appears to be wholly silent. 


Gregory of Nasztanzus. 


Gregory of Nazianzus, like his namesake of Nyssa, shows 
more of the influence of Origen upon his doctrine of man 
than does Basil. He identifies the Paradise whence Adam 
was expelled with the celestial place to which S. Paul was 
caught up}, though he definitely repudiates the theory of a 
pre-mundane fall of souls?. Perhaps there is also a trace of 
Origenism in his use of the Fall-story of Genesis after the 
manner of an allegory, as if it applied to mankind in general. 

This Father sometimes speaks of Adam’s sin as having 
brought punishment or condemnation upon us 4113 He also 
calls it ‘our’ sin, thereby implying some undefined form of 
the doctrine which was soon to occupy an all-important place 
in the theology of Augustine’. Gregory, in fact, held the 
doctrine of Original Guilt. 


Wit Psalms cxvill. IV. 2. 

2 γαῖ xxxvii. 15, cited below, p. 321. ; 

3 Orat. xxxix. 16. ‘‘Adam closed heaven, like Paradise, to all his 
descendants.” 

Orat. xxii. 13. ᾿Ἐχρῆν yap, ἐπειδὴ θεότης ἥνωται, διαιρεῖσθαι τὴν ἀνθρωπότητα, 
καὶ περὶ τὸν νοῦν ἀνοηταίνειν τοὺς τἄλλα σοφούς: καὶ μὴ ὅλον pe σώζεσθαι, ὅλον 
πταίσαντα καὶ κατακριθέντα ἐκ τῆς τοῦ πρωτοπλάστου παρακοῆς, καὶ κλοπῆς τοῦ 
ἀντικειμένου. 

Turmel, of. cz¢., gives the following citations and references : 

καὶ οὕτως ὁ νέος ᾿Αδὰμ τὸν παλαιὸν ἀνασώσηται καὶ λυθῇ τὸ κατάκριμα THs σαρκός, 
σαρκὶ τοῦ θανάτου θανατωθέντοςς (Orat. xxxix. 13.) ‘Since those whom the 
enjoyment of the forbidden tree has condemned (κατέκρινε) have been justified 
through the passion of Christ.” (Orat. xxxviii. 4.) 

4 Μὴ βαρυνέσθω δὲ ὁ ζυγός, μηδὲ τῆς πρώτης ἡμῶν ἁμαρτίας τὸ ἐπιτίμιον. Orat. 
xix. 13. Cf. Orat. xxxiii. g (Migne, P. G. XXXVI. 225). ...mdvres dé of τοῖν αὐτοῦ 
᾿Αδὰμ μετασχόντες, καὶ ὑπὸ τοῦ ὄφεως παραλογισθέντες, καὶ TH ἁμαρτίᾳ θανατωθέντες, 
καὶ διὰ τοῦ ἐπουρανίου ᾿Αδὰμ ἀνασωθέντες, καὶ πρὸς τὸ ξύλον τῆς ζωῆς ἐπαναχθέντες 
διὰ τοῦ ξύλου τῆς ἀτιμίας, ὅθεν ἀποπεπτώκαμεν. 

Cf. also Orat. xliv. 4 (Μ. XXXvI. 611). El μὲν οὖν ἐμείναμεν, ὅπερ ἧμεν, καὶ 
τὴν ἐντολὴν ἐφυλάξαμεν, ἐγενόμεθα ἂν ὅπερ οὐκ ἦμεν, τῷ ξύλῳ τῆς ζωῆς προσελθόντες, 
μετὰ τὸ ξύλον τῆς γνώσεως. 


Χμ] zz the Fathers before Augustine 310 


He is not more definite in his allusions to transmitted 
sin in the subjective sense of that term, ze. hereditary taint or 
sinful tendency. Indeed he only seems to hint once or twice 
at such a conception: and when he does so, fleshly birth is 
suggested as the means whereby such moral taint is handed 
down. He quotes the well-known verse of Job (xxv. 4), in 
which the inherent defilement attaching to every mortal is 
spoken of*: but he does not cite it in connexion with the 
doctrine of the Fall. He emphasises, however, the Virgin- 
birth of our Lord,as a means whereby we are freed from “ the 
fetters of our birth®.” He also regarded infants, dying with- 
out baptism, as excluded from the glory of heaven, though 
not as condemned to suffer pains*. The innocence which he 
ascribes to them may of course be merely innocence of actual 
sin, and his teaching on this subject may be independent of 
the presuppositions involved in the doctrine of Original Sin, 
though it is perhaps more natural to infer that his denial of 
the glories of heaven to the unbaptised was in some way 
connected with the doctrine of our condemnation for Adam’s 
sin. 

Gregory stops considerably short of the teaching of Augus- 
tine, though he was appealed to by the latter Father as a 
witness to the catholicity of his views. Gregory was far from 
asserting the total depravity of man or the loss of his free- 
will; but he held that mankind had become impaired in body 
and soul, and had passed into a state of condemnation, in 
consequence of Adam’s sin. 


Gregory of Nyssa. 


Of the three great Cappadocian divines Gregory of Nyssa 
was the most systematic as a theologian and philosopher. 
For this reason, perhaps, we find in his writings a somewhat 
fuller treatment of the doctrine of the Fall, and the use of 


1 Orat. xiv. 30 (Δ. XXXv. 897). καθαρὸς yap ἀπὸ ῥύπου παντελῶς οὐδείς, οὐκ 
οὖν ἐν γεννητῇ φύσει, ὥσπερ ἠκούσαμεν. 

2 τῶν δεσμῶν τῆς γεννήσεως, Orat. xxxvili. 17. 

*Orat. xi. 23. 

χείρους δὲ οὗτοι, τῶν ἐξ ἀγνοίας Kal τυραννίδος ἀποπιπτόντων τῆς δωρεᾶς.. τοὺς 
δὲ μήτε δοξασθήσεσθαι, μήτε κολασθήσεσθαι παρὰ τοῦ δικαίου κριτοῦ, ὡς ἀσφραγί- 
στους μέν, ἀπονήρους δέ, ἀλλὰ παθόντας μᾶλλον τὴν ζημίαν, ἢ δράσαντας. 


320 Lhe Doctrine of the Fall etc. (CHAP. 


somewhat more precise language in its exposition, than we 
meet with in the works of the two theologians last considered. 
The influence of Origen’s speculation on the Fall is distinctly 
traceable in the anthropology of Gregory of Nyssa. The 
coats of skin, wherewith Adam and Eve were clothed after 
their transgression, are explained as denoting mortality, or the 
bodily consequences of the Fall; and man is not only declared 
to have been originally immortal*, but also, as will presently 
be seen, almost angelic in nature. Further, the Fall bestowed 
upon us all we share in common with the irrational creatures*. 
As a particular case of such a general consequence, Gregory 
held that human generation is one result of the fall of man. 
And this view is not only adopted when he is concerned to 
uphold the dignity of the state of virginity It is implied 
upon other occasions; for he tells us that, had there been no 
Fall, the human race would have multiplied after the manner 
of the angels® On the other hand, a contrary opinion finds 
expression in his writings®. 

But in spite of these opinions, which certainly must be 
called Semi-Origenistic, Gregory did not accept, in its entirety, 
the earlier of Origen’s theories as to the nature of the Fall. 
Indeed he repudiated the idea of a pre-existent state and of 


1 See Orat. Catech. c. 8 (Migne, ?.G. XLV. 33), where the ‘skins’ are 
explained to mean mortality; also De Anima et Resurr. (M. XLVI. 148) where 
they signify birth, generation, gradual growth, age, sickness, as well as death, and 
are explained as τὸ σχῆμα τῆς ἀλόγου φύσεως, ᾧ πρὸς τὸ πάθος οἰκειωθέντες περιε- 
βλήθημεν. Cf. also De Virginit. c. 12, where the coats of skin are identified with 
TO φρόνημα τῆς σαρκός. 

This interpretation of the coats of skin, associated above chiefly with the name 
of Origen, is, however, not in the first instance due to that Father. It is found 
in Clement of Alexandria, and was used also by the Gnostics. Its source has 
indeed been thought to be rabbinical. But Origen used it in the interests of his 
Platonic doctrines of pre-existence and the fall of souls, and it is in this connexion 
that it chiefly concerns us here. 

2 Vita Moysis (M. XLIV. 397; cf. XLV. 33. C). 

3 De Anima et Resurr. (M. XLVI. 148). ἐπεὶ οὖν ὅσα ἐκ τῆς ἀλόγου ζωῆς 
τῇ ἀνθρωπίνῃ κατεμίχθη φύσει οὐ πρότερον ἣν ἐν ἡμῖν πρὶν εἰς πάθος διὰ κακίας 
πεσεῖν τὸ ἀνθρώπινον.... See, further, M. XLVI. 373, 376. 

4 De Virgin, Cc. 12 ΓΝ ΣΥΝΕ cf.2377, etc.). 

A similar view to this occurs in the Apocalypse of Baruch; see above, p. 215. 

® De Hom. opif. cc. 16, 17, etc. 

© Oral. Catech, 628 (MO χὴν 75) 


xm] 29 the Fathers before Augustine 321 


the entrance of human souls into this world in consequence of 
their defection from good in another world’. 

Thus Gregory was led to depict the paradisaic state of our 
first parents as in some sense heavenly, or angelic, though he 
stopped short of Origen’s belief that the human race enjoyed 
this heaven-like life in another and higher world than this. 
His Origenistic tendencies are, doubtless, mainly responsible 
for his undue exaltation of the unfallen state of Adam®. 

It will already be manifest, from the foregoing statements 
and citations from Gregory's works, that this Father taught 
that the Fall introduced death into the world for all, and that, 
in consequence of that catastrophe, the nature of man’s body 
was changed and concupiscence arose. 

Passing on to inquire into Gregory’s usage of the concep- 
tion of man’s solidarity with Adam, we again, perhaps, find 
his thought moulded chiefly by Origenistic, or at least 
Hellenic, speculation. We have seen that this Father’s 
adherence to the traditional and literal interpretation of the 
early chapters of Genesis was very loose. It must further be 
pointed out that he often uses ‘Adam’ as equivalent to ‘the 
race, or rather to the human nature common to the race?. 
Gregory thus supplies a link between Origen’s conception of 


1 See De Hom. Opif. cc. 28, 29. 

Harnack, of. cit. vol. III. p. 277, says: ‘*though Gregory rejected Origen’s 
theories of the pre-existence of souls, the pre-temporal fall, and the world as a 
place of punishment, regarding them as Hellenic dogmas and therefore mytho- 
logical, yet he was dominated by the fundamental thought which led Origen to 
the above view.” 

It was mentioned above that Gregory of Nazianzus similarly declined to accept 
completely the theory of Origen. This Father’s words may here be quoted: 
φοβοῦμαι μὴ καὶ ἄτοπός τις εἰσέλθῃ λογισμὸς ὡς THs ψυχῆς ἀλλαχοῦ πολιτευσαμένης, 
εἶτα τῷ σώματι τούτῳ ἐνδεθείσης. Greg. Naz. Orat, XXXVIL. 15. 

5. De hom. opif. c. 17. Ἢ δὲ τῆς ἀναστάσεως χάρις οὐδὲν ἕτερον ἡμῖν ἐπαγ- 
γέλλεται, ἢ τὴν εἰς τὸ ἀρχαῖον τῶν πεπτωκότων ἀποκατάστασιν. 

]όϊα. c. 5. καθαρότης, ἀπάθεια, μακαριότης, κακοῦ παντὸς ἀλλοτρίωσις καὶ ὅσα 
τοῦ τοιούτου γένους ἐστίν, δι’ ὧν μορφοῦται τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἡ πρὸς τὸ θεῖον ὁμοίωσις. 
See also the numerous references to passages on man’s first estate given by Hilt, 
Des h. Gregor v. Nyssa Lehre v. Menschen. 

3 See De hom. opif. cc. 16, 17, 22. Prof. Harnack, of. cz. p. 279, note 1, 
says, with reference to these passages: ‘‘ Gregory here carries his speculation still 
further: God did not first create a single man, but the whole race in a previously 
fixed number; these collectively composed only one nature. They were really ove 


Le 21 


950 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


mankind’s physical existence in Adam and the Augustinian 
realism. 

Unlike all the Greek Fathers, with the solitary exception 
of Origen, Gregory of Nyssa has a definite conception of 
original sin in the subjective sense, or, in other words, of 
hereditary moral taint traceable to the Fall as its cause. The 
heredity of death, a thing now natural to us, is recognised’, 
and the sinfulness of our nature is also asserted”. Further, 
Gregory speaks of our za¢ure, and not merely of us men as 
individuals, as having fallen into sin*. To partake of Adam’s 
nature is to partake of his fall‘ Consequently, whenever we 
find allusions, in this Father’s writings, to inborn sin, or to sin 
as belonging to our nature as it now is®, we must assume that 
they presuppose the doctrine of the Fall. Such inborn sin is 
removed by baptism ®. 

The nature of the inborn sin which we all inherit is yet 
more precisely defined by Gregory. In other words, particular 
ways in which human nature has been affected by the Fall 
are distinguished. Some of these have indeed already been 
incidentally mentioned. Gregory’s doctrine of the original] 


man, divided into a multiplicity. Adam—that means all. In God’s prescience the 
whole of humanity was comprised in the first preparation.” 

The idea that Adam represented the race appears, as was observed above, 
in Methodius, whom Gregory seems sometimes closely to have followed. See, ¢.g., 
Methodius, Conviv. dec. virg. 111. 4, 7,8, and Ul. 6. οὕτω δὴ πάλιν ἐν τῷ ἀνειληφότι 
Χριστῷ τὸν ᾿Αδὰμ πάντες ζωοποιηθῶσιν. 

1 Jn Cant. Cantor. Hom. ΧΙ. (M. XLIV. 1021). KarauexOévros drat τοῦ 
Θανάτου τῇ φύσει, συνδιεξῆλθε ταῖς τῶν τικτομένων διαδοχαῖς ἡ νεκρότης. Ὅθεν 
νεκρὸς ἡμᾶς διεδέξατο βίος. 

2 Orat. Catech, c. 8 (M. XLV. 33). Man is here said to have produced sin 
through free-will, and to have mingled it with our nature, and so to have trans- 
formed that nature into a state of vice. 

In De Vita Moysis (M. XLIV. 336) Gregory says of Christ : τὸν τὴν ἁμαρτητικὴν 
ἡμῶν φύσιν περιβαλλόμενον. 

5. Μ. XLIV. 337. Λόγος τίς ἐστιν ἐκ πατρικῆς παραδόσεως τὸ πιστὸν ἔχων, ὅς 
φησι, πεσούσης ἡμῶν εἰς ἁμαρτίαν τῆς φύσεως μὴ παριδεῖν τὸν θεὸν τὴν πτῶσιν 
ἀπρονόητον. 

Ἔ ΔΙ. XLIV. 756. ὁ κοινωνῶν τῆς φύσεως τοῦ ᾿Αδάμ, κοινωνῶν δὲ καὶ τῆς 
ἐκπτώσεως. 

δ e.g. Ln Psalmos (M. XLV. 609); ἡ ἁμαρτία ἡ συναποτικτομένη τῇ φύσει. CE. 
the next citation, and De Beatitud. (M. XLIV. 1273). 


δ Orat. Catech. c. 35 (M. XLV. 80). δι’ ὧν ἐκλύεταί πως 6 ἄνθρωπος τῆς πρὸς 
τὸ κακὸν συμφυΐας. 


xut}] 2, the Fathers before Augustine 523 


state involves that concupiscence, which he calls τὸ φρόνημα 
τῆς capKos}, is necessarily a consequence of the Fall; and 
this inference he himself expressly draws. Our whole nature 
has also been weakened, and our understanding darkened?. 
The ideas expressed in the series of passages which have 
just been cited represent the nearest approach which the 
thought of the Eastern Church had ever as yet made to the 
Augustinian theory of Original Sin. And if the homily /z 
Hud: ‘ Tunc ipse Filius subjicietur’ etc. be a genuine work of 
Gregory of Nyssa, which some authorities have doubted, we 
may quote from this Father still more definite language con- 
cerning the transmission of sin through one to the whole race’. 
In any case we have evidence sufficient to show that the 
essential constituent ideas of Augustine’s theory, that of our 
inclusion in Adam and that of our ‘corrupted’ nature as 
derived by physical descent from Adam, were integral 
elements in Gregory’s anthropology. Gregory of Nyssa 
therefore occupies an interesting place in connexion with the 
history of the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin. He was 
anticipated, of course, in his approach to the Augustinian 
teaching, by Origen among the Fathers of the East; and he 
did not perhaps contribute much that was wholly new to the 
discussion of the problem of human sin. But what Origen 
taught tentatively, and apparently with a certain amount of 
vacillation, with regard to hereditary corruption, Gregory had 
grasped with clearness and firmness. He _ stood, unlike 


AME XLVI 390.8 Bs 

2 De orat. domin. 4 (M. XLIV. 1164). ἀσθενὴς ἡ ἀνθρωπίνη φύσις πρὸς τὸ 
ἀγαθόν ἐστιν, ἅπαξ διὰ κακίας ἐκνευρισθεῖσα. Οὐ yap μετὰ τῆς εὐκολίας, ἧς πρὸς 
τὸ κακὸν ὁ ἄνθρωπος ἔρχεται, καὶ ἀπὸ τούτου πάλιν ἐπὶ τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἐπανέρχεται. 

De Beatitud. 5 (M.X11V. 1240). ᾿Εν τούτῳ γὰρ μάλιστα τῷ μέρει πλημμελεῖται 
ἡμῶν ἡ ζωή, ἐν τῷ μὴ δύνασθαι ἀκριβῶς συνιέναι, τί τὸ φύσει καλὸν καὶ τὸ δ΄ ἀπάτης 
τοιοῦτον ὑπονοούμενον. 

Cf. De Vita Moysts (M. XLIv. 397, B). 

3M. xLiv. 1312. Δείξας τοίνυν ἐν τοῖς πρὸς αὐτοὺς λόγοις, ὅτι τοῦ πρώτου 
ἀνθρώπου εἰς "γῆν διὰ τῆς ἁμαρτίας ἀναλυθέντος, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο χοϊκοῦ κληθέντος, ἀκόλ- 
ουθον ἣν κατ᾽ ἐκεῖνον καὶ τοὺς ἐξ ἐκείνου γενέσθαι πάντας χοϊκοὺς καὶ θνητοὺς τοὺς ἐκ τοῦ 
τοιούτου φύντας, ἀναγκαίως ἐπήγαγεν καὶ τὴν δευτέραν ἀκολουθίαν, di ἧς ἀναστοιχειοῦται 
πάλιν ἐκ τοῦ θνητοῦ πρὸς ἀθανασίαν ὁ ἄνθρωπος, ὁμοιοτρόπως λέγων, τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἐγγεγε- 
νῆσθαι τῇ φύσει ἐξ ἑνὸς εἰς πάντας χεόμενον, ὥσπερ καὶ τὸ κακὸν δι᾿ ἑνὸς εἰς πλῆθος 
ἐχέθη, τῇ διαδοχῇ τῶν ἐπιγινομένων. 


FANS 


324 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [CHapP. 


Origen, at the threshold of the Augustinian era, and used the 
categories more akin to those of the great Father of the 
West. And herein he marks, from the point of view of the 
historian of the doctrine of Original Sin, a stage of progress in 
the thought of the Greek Fathers. He witnesses, in fact, to 
the readiness now existing within the Eastern portion of 
Christendom to assimilate the more essential features of the 
theory which was soon to dominate the thought of the Church 
as a whole with regard to the origin and propagation of human 
sin}, 


VII. THE ANTIOCHENE SCHOOL. 


Under the above heading, a few words may be said with 
regard to the attitude of the two Fathers Chrysostom and 
Theodore of Mopsuestia towards the doctrines whose early 
history is here being investigated. It is true that their 
writings cannot be searched for what can properly be called 
sources of these doctrines. They serve to illustrate the 
the growth of the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin rather 
in a somewhat negative manner. Chrysostom, indeed, was 
cited by Augustine as an authority on his side, in his contro- 
versy with Julian of Eclanum; but not perhaps very 
pertinently*: whilst Theodore is rather to be called an 


1 Two passages should perhaps be mentioned here which have seemed to some 
writers to imply a denial, on Gregory’s part, of the doctrine of Original Sin. The 
one passage occurs in De Jnfantibus qui praem. abrip. (M. XLVI. 177). Τὸ δὲ 
ἀπειρόκακον νήπιον μηδεμιᾶς νόσου τῶν τῆς ψυχῆς ὀμμάτων πρὸς τὴν τοῦ φωτὸς 
μετουσίαν ἐπιπροσθούσης, ἐν TO κατὰ φύσιν γίνεται, μὴ δεόμενον τῆς ἐκ τοῦ καϑαρῆναι 
ὑγιείας, ὅτι μηδὲ τὴν ἀρχὴν τὴν νόσον τῇ ψυχῇ mapedéiaro. The other is to be 
found in the Zz δαί. Christi (M. XLVI. 580). ἀλλὰ τὸν κατεστιγμένον ταῖς 
ἁμαρτίαις καὶ κακοῖς ἐπιτηδεύμασιν ἐμπαλαιωθέντα χάριτι βασιλικῇ ἐπανάγομεν εἰς τὸ 
τοῦ βρέφους ἀνεύθυνον. 

These passages may possibly refer only to the freedom of infants from actual 
sin, as Hilt maintains (Des hetl. Gregor von Nyssa Lehre vom Menschen, S. 120 ff.). 
But a pre-Augustinian writer, in dealing at different times with subjects touching 
the fringe of so intricate a matter as original sin, might easily be unintentionally 
guilty of inconsistency in expression. However these exceptional utterances are to 
be interpreted, there can be no doubt that Gregory was an upholder of the doctrine 
of hereditary sinfulness derived from Adam, though possibly he had not so clearly 
thought out all its far-reaching consequences, as Augustine was soon to do. 

2 C. Julianum, 1. vi. 24, 26. Augustine quotes Chrysostom as declaring that 
Adam ‘‘condemned the whole human race” (22. iii. 3). He also quotes, from 


Η͂ 
| 
i 


xi] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 5325 


avowed Pelagian, so far as the doctrine of Sin is in question, 
than to be quoted as a witness to the catholicity or to the 
development of the Augustinian theory of the Fall. The 
Antiochene Fathers, in fact, represent rather, in its logical 
completion, that side of Eastern thought concerning human 
sinfulness which emphasised individual responsibility, and not 
that which, from Origen downwards, approached more or less 
the position elaborated by S. Augustine in the West. 


Chrysostom. 


There is little to be found in Chrysostom’s writings in 
favour of a doctrine of Original Sin, save that he recognises 
that universal mortality was a consequence of Adam’s sin}. 
Even in this assertion he makes an advance in the direction 
of Augustinianism in which at least one Antiochene theologian 
will not accompany him. But otherwise Chrysostom tends to 
minimise the results of the first transgression. This is very 
obvious in his Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans. In 
his exegesis of Rom. v. 12 ff., he appears to be evidently out 
of harmony with the thought of the apostle upon whose words 
he is commenting; and his interpretation of them is some- 
times arbitrary and otherwise unsatisfactory. The citations 
given below will serve to illustrate Chrysostom’s misappre- 
hension of S. Paul’s meaning, and to show how he shrank 
from teaching the solidarity of the race in Adam’s sin or in 
its moral consequences. The words of S. Paul, “for that all 
sinned,” Chrysostom took to mean: ‘all became mortal?” 
an address to neophytes, as follows: ἔρχεται ἅπαξ ὁ Χριστός, εὗρεν ἡμῶν χειρό- 
ypapov πατρῷον, ὅ τι ἔγραφεν ὁ ᾿Αδάμ. ᾿Εκεῖνος τὴν ἀρχὴν εἰσήγαγεν τοῦ χρείους, 
ἡμεῖς τὸν δανεισμὸν ηὐξήσαμεν ταῖς μετα γενεστέραις ἁμαρτίαις. 

This latter passage, like others appealed to by Augustine, is hardly sufficient to 
furnish him with valuable support. 

1 Hom. in Gen. xiii. 4, XV. 4, xvi. 6, ete. 

? The following passage was appealed to as implying Pelagian ideas by Julian 
of Eclanum. Ti mor οὖν ἐστι τὸ ζήτημα; τὸ λέγειν διὰ τῆς παρακοῆς τοῦ ἑνὸς 
ἁμαρτωλοὺς γενέσθαι πολλούς: τὸ μὲν γὰρ ἁμαρτόντος ἐκείνου καὶ γενομένου θνητοῦ, 
καὶ τοὺς ἐξ αὐτοῦ τοιούτους εἶναι, οὐδὲν ἀπεικός" τὸ δὲ ἐκ τῆς παρακοῆς ἐκείνου ἕτερον 
ἁμαρτωλὸν γενέσθαι, ποίαν ἂν ἀκολουθίαν σχοίη; εὑρεθήσεται γὰρ οὕτω μηδὲ δίκην 
ὀφείλων ὁ τοιοῦτος, εἴ γε μὴ οἴκοθεν γέγονεν ἁμαρτωλός. Τί οὖν ἐστιν ἐνταῦθα τὸ 
ἁμαρτωλοί; ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ τὸ ὑπεύθυνοι κολάσει, καὶ καταδεδικασμένοι θανάτῳ. --- Hom. x. 


In Rom. v. (Migne, P.G. LX. 477). 
For further illustration of Chrysostom’s exegesis of Rom. v. 12 ff., a few 


326 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


Chrysostom does not appear to have recognised any 
doctrine of inherited sinfulness of nature. It is true that, 
when he speaks of infants as having no sin, his language is 
capable of being so interpreted as only to assert the absence 
of personal, or actual, sin. But even then, his expressions 
would seem to be very unguarded if he really believed in 
inborn taint of nature. Moreover he nowhere allows that the 
Fall had any effect upon man’s freedom of will, or that 
concupiscence is of the nature οἵ sin. 

Chrysostom wrote before the Pelagian controversy came 
up, or perhaps he would have expressed himself in words 
different from some of those which he actually used in 
discussing human sin. We observe in him, however, appar- 
ently as spontaneous tendencies, germs of some of the ideas 
afterwards to be identified with the heresies of Pelagius, and 


sentences may be quoted from the same Homily. The Eng. tr. is that of the 
Library of the Fathers, Oxford. 

‘“* How then did death come in and prevail? Through the sin of one. But what 
means: for that all stnned? This: He having once fallen, even they that had 
not eaten of the tree did from him, all of them, become mortal....” 

‘*In saying that 72/7 the Law, stn was in the world, what he seems to me 
to mean is this: that, after the Law was given, the sin resulting from the 
transgression of it prevailed, and prevailed too so long as the Law existed. For 
sin, he says, can have no existence if there be no law. If then it was this sin, 
he means, from the transgression of the Law that brought forth death, how was 
it that all before the Law died? For if it is in sin that death has its origin, but 
where there is no law sin is not imputed, how came death to prevail? From 
whence it is clear that it was not ¢zs sin, the transgression, that is, of the Law, 
but that of Adam’s disobedience, which marred all things. Now what is the 
proof of this? The fact that even hefore the Law all died.” 

Here the commentator allows that Adam’s disobedience ‘‘ marred all things.” 
But he does not consider that S, Paul himself made his meaning clear in the 
passage which he here discusses. For elsewhere, //om. xvi. on Rom. xi. 10, 
while referring to Rom. v. 17, Chrysostom writes thus: 

‘And the case of Adam, indeed, he does not clear up, but from it he clears 
up his own, and shows that it was more reasonable that He who died in their 
behalf should have power over them at His will. For that, when one had sinned, 
all should be punished, does not seem to be so very reasonable to most men. But 
that, when One had done right, all should be justified, is at once more reason- 
able and more suited to God. Yet still he has not solved the difficulty he has 
raised. For the more obscure that point remained, the more the Jew was put to 
silence.” 


Another passage which somewhat minimises the doctrine of the Fall may be 
found in Hom. on 1 Cor. xvil. 4. ee 


Χ] 2% the Fathers before Augustine 5327 


indeed consciously embraced, and defended against the 
champions of Augustinian views, by his later contemporary, 
Theodore of Mopsuestia. 


Theodore of Mopsuestia. 


Theodore, who supplies us with the ripest fruits of 
Antiochene theological thought, shaped a philosophy of man 
differing in a marked degree from those of previous Fathers, 
such as Irenaeus, Origen and Gregory of Nyssal. 

Confining ourselves here to the briefest summary of his 
views concerning the Fall and its consequences, we may 
note, in the first place, that he stands out in a somewhat 
isolated position in that he repudiates the practically universal 
belief that Adam’s transgression was the cause of mortality to 
all mankind? 


Theodore asserts our unity with Adam; but this idea is 
never used by him to explain the universal spread of sin’ In 


1 For some account of his system the reader is referred to Harnack, of. cit. 
vol. Il]. pp. 279 ff. 

2 In Epist. ad Gal. ii. t5, 16. Dominus Deus mortales quidem nos secundum 
praesentem vitam instituit. Resuscitans vero, iterum immortales nos facere promisit 
et faciet. Nec enim illud contra suam veniens sententiam, ob solum Adae peccatum 
ira commotus, fecisse videtur—indecens enim id erga Deum existimare; neque 
secundum quod nos facit immortales, poenitentia ductus id facit, aut quia de his 
melius postea voluit cogitare. Sed inenarrabili sapientia a primordio illa quae de 
nobis sunt omnia instituit, sicut et fas est nos sentire de illo, qui bonitate sola nos 
faciebat et factos tuebatur. Dedit autem nobis praesentem hanc vitam mortalem, 
ut dixi, ad exercitationem virtutum et -doctrinam illorum quae nos conveniunt 
facere. 

Theodore, a little further on, uses the phrases ‘ naturalis mortalitas,’ ‘ mortali- 
tate naturae.’ 

The view implied in the foregoing passage is more explicitly stated in the 
following Latin fragments of Theodore’s work on Original Sin: 

Migne, ?.G. LXVI. 1005. Non ait Deus ‘mortales eritis,’ sed ‘ sorte mori- 
emini, prorsus existentibus natura mortalibus inferre mortis experientiam com- 
minatus...non quod tunc mortales fierent, sed quod digni essent qui mortis sententiam 
per transgressionem referrent. 

Ibid. 1011. Certum est enim quia si eum immortalem esse voluisset, ne ipsum 
quidem intercedens peccatum Dei sententiam commutasset, quia nec diabolum 
fecit ex immortali mortalem, et quidem cunctorum malorum existentem principium. 

3 In Epist. B. Pauli Commentarii, ed. Swete, vol. 1. p. 57. τῆς παρούσης 
ζωῆς ἀρχὴ μὲν τοῖς πᾶσιν 6’Adau. Els δὲ ἄνθρωπος ol πάντες ἐσμὲν τῷ λόγῳ τῆς 
φύσεως, πρὸς γὰρ δὴ τὸ κοινὸν ὡσπερεὶ μέλους τάξιν ὁ καθεὶς ἡμῶν ἐπέχει. So, 
he adds, will Christ be our founder in our future, immortal, life, and we shall, 
as it were, be made one in him. Here obviously, we have mysticism, not realism. 


328 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. (CHAP. 


the matter of sin, he regards Adam as our type, not our 
ancestor. The doctrine of Original Sin was repudiated by 
Theodore, and he denied that baptism removed inherited cor- 
‘ruption. This Father is mentioned here only because he 
represents the opposition which served to give definiteness to 
the Augustinian doctrine. 


VIII. TERTULLIAN. 


Since reviewing the doctrine of Irenaeus with regard to 
the Fall and its effects upon the moral state of mankind, we 
have been exclusively occupied with the thought, on this 
subject, of the more important Fathers of the Eastern Church. 
And we have seen that, in spite of the tendency, natural to 
the Eastern mind, to emphasise individual responsibility and 
free-will, nevertheless the belief in the race’s solidarity and 
unity with its first parent, on the one hand, and in the here- 
dity of moral taint derived from fallen Adam, on the other, 
was discoverable in most of the Greek Fathers from Origen 
onwards. 

We have now to return to the time at which Western or 
Latin thought began to busy itself with problems connected 
with the origin and universality of human sinfulness, and 
attempted to formulate a system of doctrine on this subject. 

The beginning was made by Tertullian. 

The speculations of this Father on the subject of the 
propagation of sinfulness are of the highest importance in the 
history of the doctrine of Original Sin. Tertullian may 
perhaps be regarded as the founder of the Church’s doctrine 
of hereditary sinfulness of nature derived from Adam. For 
whilst Origen taught that every man born into the world 
brought with him some kind of defilement, he did not always 
identify this taint with sin, and scarcely ever attributed it to 
Adam’s Fall: but Tertullian is very explicit as to both these 
points. And further, although one line of Origen’s teaching 
tended, hesitatingly, in the direction of Augustinianism, as 
has been shown above, this Father seems to have exerted 
extremely little direct influence upon the treatment accorded 


1 See Harnack, Joc. cit. 


xi] 2,21 the Fathers before Augustine 5320 


to the problem of Original Sin by his successors, at least until 
the time of the Cappadocians; whereas Tertullian’s discus- 
sion of the problem served, without doubt, to fix once and for 
all the main lines along which speculation was to proceed 
within the Latin Churches, and perhaps also to impart an 
element of precision to the less definite thought of some of 
the later pre-Augustinian Fathers of the East. 

It was, however, the results of Tertullian’s reasoning, 
divorced from the presuppositions which guided him to them, 
which alone were taken over as permanent doctrine. The 
theory by which he explained the transmission of inborn 
corruption, and gave coherence to his views concerning our 
relation to Adam and our participation in our first father’s 
fall, did not become an integral part of the doctrine of Original 
Sin which was adopted by the Church. 

It would perhaps be fruitless to attempt to estimate what 
might have been the extent of Tertullian’s interest in the 
problem of Original Sin and of his influence on the thought of 
subsequent theologians, had his own speculation not been 
guided by his traducianist theory of the origin of the human 
soul. But certainly much of the definiteness of his vocabu- 
lary, a very important item in any system of doctrine, and 
probably much of the coherence and distinctness of his 
thought as to human solidarity in sin, would, in that case, 
have been wanting. To some extent, at least, it must be 
supposed that his traducianism was to Tertullian what the 
Recapitulation-doctrine probably was to Irenaeus, and what 
the Jewish law of purification and the Christian practice of 
infant baptism were to Origen; namely, a source of his par- 
ticular conception of the hereditary consequences to the race 
of the transgression of its head, and of his particular explana- 
tion of the universal sinfulness of mankind. 

Inasmuch as we are here primarily concerned with the 
sources of the doctrine of Original Sin, it will be relevant to 
point out whence Tertullian derived his traducianist psycho- 
logy. 

A word may first of all be said, however, as to this Father’s 
relation to his immediate predecessor, Irenaeus. The latter 
writer, it will be remembered, had no doctrine of Original Sin 


330 Lhe Doctrine of the Fall etc. [CHapP. 


in its subjective sense of inborn moral taint or corruption of 
nature; but he conceived of Adam as in some mystic sense 
representing and including all his children. 

From this conception, it may well be, Tertullian’s doctrine 
took its start. Such a stage of thought would seem to be 
represented, for instance, in his words: ita omnis anima eo 
usque in Adam censetur donec in Christo recenseatur’. But 
concreteness was the most characteristic quality of Tertullian’s 
thought; and the vague, mystical language of Irenaeus, 
modelled probably on the largely rhetorical and symbolical 
phrases of S. Paul with regard to Adam’s relation to the race, 
is almost always replaced, in the writings of the African 
lawyer, by terms embodying the bluntest physical realism. 

This fact is the consequence of Tertullian having been 
deeply imbued with the Stoic philosophy, which, more than 
any other system, prevailed: in the Roman world of his time. 
Though Tertullian frequently declaims with his usual energy 
against philosophy as the fertile source of heresy, with which 
Christianity can come to no terms, and professes to deduce 
his doctrine of the nature of the soul only from what has 
been revealed,’ it is nevertheless true that he was himself 
somewhat of a philosopher, and that he was very largely 
indebted to current philosophy in the elaboration of his own 
theological teaching. His relation to Stoicism, in particular, 
will be made obvious by the following exposition of Tertul- 
lian’s doctrine of the soul and its mode of origin. 

Tertullian taught the corporeality of all existences. 
“Everything that is, is body*.” Consequently he held that 
the soul, and even God Himself, are corporeal. Of the soul 
he says: Nihil enim, si non corpus‘; and of God: Quis enim 
negaverit deum corpus esse, etsi deus spiritus est? Spiritus 
enim corpus sui generis in sua effigie’, The meaning of 
‘corpus’ is not perhaps always quite the same in Tertullian’s 
writings. Sometimes it seems to bear the sense of sub- 


1 De Anima, 40. 
* See the early chapters of the De Anima. 


3 Omne quod est, corpus est sui generis; nihil est incorporale, nisi quod 
non est (De Carne Christz, 11). 


4 De Anima, 7. f ATV ELT AN eT. 


xi] 2922 the Fathers before Augustine 331 


stantiality, but sometimes it certainly rather appears to 
signify attenuated materiality; the soul, at any rate, is said to 
possess the properties of matter. The source of such ideas is 
undoubtedly the Stoic ontology!; though,-as has been said, 
Tertullian professes to derive them from the gospel, and 
merely to have the philosophers sometimes on his side. 

More important for us is Tertullian’s view as to the origin 
of human souls. This, which can be gathered in detail from 
the citations given below’, may briefly be summed up 
as follows. The soul is produced, like the body, by the 
union of the parents. It does not enter the body after birth, 
but is produced simultaneously with it. As the parent bodies 
produce the child’s body, so do the parent souls produce in 
similar way the child’s soul. 

This traducianist theory of the soul’s origin and self-propa- 
gation was commonly held by representatives of the Stoic 
system of philosophy; and it was thence that Tertullian 
originally learned it. He himself quotes Cleanthes as saying 
that “family likeness passes from parents to their children not 
merely in bodily features, but in characteristics of the soul,” 
words which, however, do not necessarily imply traducianism ; 
and he also cites Zeno as “defining the soul to be a spirit 


1 Cf., e.g., Diog. Laert. VII. 56, πᾶν yap τὸ ποιοῦν σῶμά ἐστιν, and Cicero, 
Acad. τ. 11. 39, Nec vero aut quod efficeret aliquid, aut quod efficeretur posse 
esse non corpus. Other elements also in Tertullian’s doctrine of the soul are 
identical with Stoic tenets. 

In De Anima, 5, Tertullian quotes Chrysippus and Cleanthes as teaching the 
corporeality of the soul. For references to Stoic philosophers who taught traduci- 
anism, see below. 

2 De Anima, 27. Eng. tr. Clark, Ante-Nic. Library. ‘How, then, is a 
living being conceived? Is the substance of both body and soul formed together 
at one and the same time? Or does one of them precede the other in natural 
formation? We indeed maintain that both are conceived, and formed, and 
perfected simultaneously, as well as born together; and not a moment’s interval 
occurs in their conception, so that a prior place can be assigned to either.” 

The discussion of this point is contained in chapter 36, thus : 

Anima in utero seminata pariter cum carne, pariter cum ipsa sortitur et sexum, 
ita pariter ut in causa sexus neutra substantia tenetur. Si enim in seminibus 
utriusque substantiae, aliquam intercapedinem eorum conceptus admitteret, ut 
aut caro, aut anima prior seminaretur, esset etiam sexus proprietatum alteri 
substantiae adscribere per temporalem intercapedinem seminum; ut aut caro 
animae, aut anima carni insculperet sexum. 


332 The Doctrine of the Fall etc.  |CHAP. 


generated with the body.” But the view appears to have 
been that most generally adopted by the Stoics?. 

It is obvious that this theory of the corporeality of the 
soul and of its mode of origin lends itself to support and 
explain the doctrine of the race’s unity with, and inclusion in, 
its first parent. And such 15 the most important application 
to which his traducianism was actually put by Tertullian. 
In so using it, this Father was led on to formulate, by means 
of it, a theory of hereditary sinful taint. As Irenaeus had 
been the first to assert, as a doctrine, that Adam represented 
and summed up in himself the whole human race, in a 
mystical sense, so Tertullian was the first to impart a realistic 
meaning to this doctrine, and also to give to the Church 
a definite theory of inherited corruption of nature. 

Inasmuch as the soul of the child was regarded by Ter- 
tullian as derived from the soul of its father, like a shoot 
(¢radux) from the parent stock of a tree, it followed that he 
must look upon every human soul as ultimately a branch 
(surculus) of Adam’s soul. And inasmuch as the soul inherits 
from its parents their spiritual characteristics and qualities, 
those of Adam must have been transmitted to all his descen- 
dants. In fact, tradux animae tradux peccati. “Our first 
parent contained within himself the undeveloped germ of all 
mankind, and his soul was the fountain-head of all souls; all 
varieties of individual human nature are but different modifi- 
cations of that one spiritual substance. ‘Therefore the whole 
of nature became corrupt in the original father of the race, 
and sinfulness is propagated together with souls*”” This cor- 
ruption of nature is said to be ‘a second nature’; but Tertul- 
lian did not regard our corruption to be so complete that no 
goodness at all resides in the soul, nor any real freedom in 
the will’. 


1 De Anima, 5, Eng. tr. Clark, of. cit. 

2 Rauch, in his essay Der Einfluss der S.otschen Philosophie auf die Lehrbila- 
ung Tertullians, 1890, 5. 37, gives the following references: Plutarch, De pac. 
phil. IV. 2, V. 1; Zeno, cited by Eusebius, Pracp. Evang. XV. 20, 1; Chrysippus, 
cited in Diog. Laert. VII. 159; Panaetius, Cze. Zzesc. 1. 32, 79. 

ὃ. Neander’s Church History, ed. Bohn, vol. 11. pp. 346—7. 

4 See De Anima, 21. Inesse nobis τὸ αὐτεξούσιον naturaliter ; also zbzd. 41. 


ΧΙ] 722 the Fathers before Augustine 333 


The following passages give, in Tertullian’s own words, the 
details of the theories whose outlines have been sketched. 

“Every soul, then, by reason of its birth, has its nature in 
Adam until it is born again in Christ; moreover it is unclean 
all the while that it remains without this regeneration; and 
because unclean, it is actively sinful, and suffuses even the 
flesh (flesh by reason of their conjunction) with its own 
shame}.”’ 

The sentence preceding this refers to baptism and quotes 
John iil. 5. Thus the nature of every infant is here, by im- 
plication, declared to be actively sinful because possessing 
Adam’s nature. 

The source and cause of this inherent uncleanness is thus 
concisely described : 

“Through whom (ze. Satan, the corrupter of the whole 
world) man being at the beginning: beguiled into breaking the 
commandment of God, and on that account being given over 
to death, thenceforth made the whole race, infected with his 
seed, transmitters also of his condemnation?” 

Of the corruption of nature itself Tertullian says: 

“There is, then, besides the evil which supervenes on the 
soul from the intervention of the evil spirit, an antecedent, 
and in a certain sense natural, evil which arises from its 
corrupt origin (ex originis vitio). For,as we have said before, 


1 Jéid 40, E. tr. Clark, of. cit, This passage should be remembered when 
Tertullian’s utterance as to the innocence of infancy (De Bagtismo, 18) is discussed ; 
see below. 

2 De test. animae, 3. (Satanam) per quem homo a primordio circumventus, 
ut praeceptum Dei excederet, et propterea in mortem datus, exinde totum genus 
de suo semine infectum suae etiam damnationis traducem fecit. 

Cf. also: De resurr. carnis, 34. Si quidem transgressio, quae perditionis 
humanae causa est, tam animae instinctu ex concupiscentia quam et carnis actu 
ex degustatione commissa hominem elogio transgressionis inscripsit, atque exinde 
merito perditionis implevit. 

De Patientia, 5, where Eve, because she was the first to sin, is said to be the 
‘*single womb of all sin, pouring down from her spring the various streams 
of crime.” 

De Spectac. 2: ‘‘ When the power of that corrupting and adverse angel in the 
beginning cast down from his innocency man himself, the work and image of God, 
the lord of the whole world, he changed, like himself, into perverseness against 
his Maker, the whole substance of man, made, like himself, for innocency.” 
Ε. tr. Library of the Fathers, Oxford. 


334 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


the corruption of our nature is another nature (xaturae 
corruptio alia natura est) having a god and father of its own, 
namely the author of that corruption. Still there is a portion 
of good in the soul, of that original, divine and genuine good, 
which is its proper nature. For that which is derived from 
God is rather obscured than extinguished?” 

Finally, for statements with regard to the mode of the 
transmission of Adam’s nature to his posterity, other than 
such as have already been given, the reader is referred 
especially to the De Anzma?, and also to the following in- 
cidental allusion to the heredity of sin: 

“ Unbidden, I would, in such ways and at such times as I 
might have been able, have habitually accounted food as poison, 
and taken the antidote, hunger; through which to purge the 
primordial cause of death—a cause transmitted to me also, 
concurrently with my very generation®.” 

Tertullian does not seem to have spoken definitely of 
original guilt. Adam’s condemnation, his mortality, and his 
corrupted nature are transmitted ; and the state of corruption 
is described as one of active sinfulness. But though Adam’s 
punishments are represented as shared by his descendants 
and their souls were potentially in his when he sinned, 
Tertullian does not explicitly draw out the consequence, if 
necessary consequence it be, that the race shares the responsi- 
bility and guilt of its first father’s sin. 

It has indeed sometimes been argued that, because Ter- 
tullian resisted the practice of hastening the baptism of young 
children, he did not regard their uncleanness as sinfulness to 
which guilt attaches. The passage in which this practice is 
discouraged is well known‘. As has been pointed out in the 


1 De Anima, 41. 

2 Two passages may be cited. Anima (hominis) velut surculus quidam ex 
matrice Adam in propaginem deducta, et genitalibus feminae foveis commendata 
cum omni sua paratura pullulabit, tam intellectu quam sensu (c. 19).—A primordio 
in Adam concreta et configurata corpori anima, ut totius substantiae ita et con- 
ditionis istius semen effecit (c. 9). Migne, P.Z. 11. 682, 661. 

3 De Jejun. 3, E. tr. Clark, of. cit. 

+ De Bapt. 18. Quid festinat innocens aetas ad remissionem peccatorum ἢ 
Tertullian has said, a few lines earlier: ‘* And so, according to the circumstances 
and disposition, and even age, of each individual, the delay of baptism is prefer- 
able ; principally, however, in the case of little children.” (E. tr. Clark, of. c7t.) 


> Ss ἂν. 


ΧΙ] 22 the Fathers before Augustine 5535 


foregoing pages, several similar passages occur in the writings 
of Fathers who, like Clement, did not believe in original sin 
at all, or who, like Gregory of Nazianzus, believed in it 
thoroughly. Such statements may imply that baptism only 
removes actual sin, or that the pollution attaching to human 
nature, whether in consequence of the process of birth (as 
Origen generally represented it) or in consequence of descent 
from sinful Adam (as Tertullian taught), though cleansed in 
baptism, is not really of the nature of sin. The latter view is 
adopted with regard to Tertullian’s teaching by Harnack, 
Loofs and Turmel'. The rigorous and logical application of 
the consequences of the doctrine of Original Sin to the case of 
infants was only made late in the development of this doctrine ; 
it was, in fact, part of the work of S. Augustine. Perhaps the 
Fathers previous to him would have been willing to use the 
words of Cyprian: “(infanti) remittuntur non propria sed 
aliena peccata.” 

It may be concluded, from the passages of Tertullian’s 
writings which have now been examined, that this Father 
more, perhaps, than any other, prepared the way for 
S. Augustine. He was the first to formulate the idea of 
inherited sin or corruption of nature, and to explain the 
process by which such corruption is handed on from gener- 
ation to generation. This latter factor in his theory, which 
served doubtless to give the definiteness and point to Ter- 
tullian’s teaching as to the consequences of the Fall. was 
indeed rejected, or, rather, was not adopted, by Augustine or 
the Church generally. It was therefore mere scaffolding, 
which served a purpose during the building of the fabric of 
the doctrine of hereditary sin, but which was afterwards 
discarded. The results reached by its means were alone 
permanently preserved. But it may reasonably be doubted 
whether, without its aid, the definiteness of Augustine’s theory 
would have been attained, and whether, without its implica- 
tion, his doctrine can be considered self-consistent. These, 


1 Harnack, of. cit. 11. 2743 Loofs, Lettfaden f. seine Vorlesungen tiber 
Dogmengeschichte; Turmel, of. εἶ. Neander, of. cit. 11. 347, remarks that 
the De Baft. is an earlier treatise than those in which the doctrine of hereditary 
sin is unfolded. 


436 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [CHAP. 


however, are questions which we are not here concerned to 
discuss. 


IX. FROM TERTULLIAN TO AUGUSTINE. 


The development of doctrine with regard to the Fall and 
Original Sin in the Western Church after Tertullian is to be 
looked for in the writings of Cyprian, Hilary and Ambrose. 


Cyprian. 


Cyprian was not a theologian, and we cannot expect to 
find in his writings much discussion of the theoretical side of 
Christian doctrine. His few scattered allusions to the Fall 
recall the language of Tertullian’. He speaks incidentally of 
the first man’s endowment with the Holy Spirit?, and of the 
loss of the divine image through sin*. But the only passage 
that is of any importance here is the allusion to original sin 
and its relation to baptismal regeneration, in the £festle to 
fidus*: “If then even to the most grievous offenders, and 
who had before sinned much against God, when they after- 
wards believe, remission of sins is granted, and no one is 
debarred from baptism and grace, how much more ought not 
an infant to be debarred, who being newly born has in no way 
sinned, except that being born after Adam in the flesh, he 
has by his first birth contracted the contagion of the old 
death; who is on this very account more easily admitted to 

1 Such are the following: De Bono Pat. τὸ (Migne, P.Z. iv. 634). Adam 
contra coeleste praeceptum cibi lethalis impatiens, in mortem cecidit ; nec acceptam 
divinitus gratiam patientia custode servavit. 

De op. et eleem. 1 (M. Iv. 603). Nam, cum Dominus adveniens sanasset illa 
quae Adam portaverat vulnera, et venena serpentis antiqua curasset, legem dedit 


sano.... 

3 LDA he 

3 De Bon. Pat. 5. similitudo divina, quam peccato Adam perdiderat. 

4 Ep. 39 (Pamel etc.) or 64 (Oxon.). E. tr. Zid. of Fathers, Oxford. The 
following is the original: Si etiam gravissimis delictoribus et in deum multum 
ante peccantibus, quum postea crediderint, remissio peccatorum datur, et a 
baptismo atque a gratia nemo prohibetur, quanto magis prohiberi non debet 
infans, qui recens natus nihil peccavit, nisi quod secundum Adam carnaliter natus 
contagium mortis antiquae prima nativitate contraxit...qui ad remissionem pecca- 
torum accipiendam hoc ipso facilius accedit, quod illi remittuntur non propria, 
sed aliena peccata. 


xi] 722 the Fathers before Augustine 5337 


receive remission of sins, in that not his own but another’s 
sins are remitted to him.” 

Cyprian here opposes the influence of his master in urging 
the baptism of children at the earliest age. He would hasten 
them to the font in spite of their freedom from actual sin, 
and in spite of the fact that they cannot be regarded as sinful 
save in the sense of having contracted the contagion of death 
through carnal descent from Adam; the very reason why 
innocents should be baptized early, in fact, is that the sins 
remitted to them are not their own but another's. This 
Father is concerned to show that there is no reason why 
infants should not be baptized, notwithstanding their inno- 
cence, rather than to insist on the necessity of their regenera- 
tion on account of inherited taint. He cannot be said, 
therefore, to carry Tertullian’s teaching onwards in the 
direction of Augustinianism. 


Fiilary of Pottiers. 


Hilary, like Cyprian, is a link in the chain of tradition 
connecting Tertullian and Augustine, without contributing 
materially to the development of thought on the subject of Sin 
which intervened between those two teachers. 

Hilary was himself influenced by Tertullian. He repudi- 
ated, indeed, the traducianism of that writer!, but retained:his 
doctrine of vitium originis2. Sin accompanies birth? and, 
though not transmitted with and in the soul, it is conveyed to 


1 Tract. in Ps. cxviii. Litt. 4 (Migne, P.Z. 1X. 527). IRgitur, vel quia in 
terrae hujus solo commoramur, vel quia ex terra instituti conformatique sumus, 
anima quae alterius originis est, terrae corporis adhaesisse creditur. 

De Trinit. X. 20. Cum anima omnis opus Dei est, carnis vero generatio 
semper ex carne sit. 

bid. 22. Sed ut per se sibi assumpsit ex Virgine corpus, ita ex se 510] 
animam assumpsit; quae utique numquam ab homine gignentium originibus 
praebetur. (M. xX. 358, 359.) 

* Tract. in Ps. cxviii. Litt. XIV. 20 (M. IX. 599). Cor suum ipse declinat, 
et ex naturae humanae peccatis in obedientiam Dei inflectit. Natura quidem 
et origo carnis suae eum detinebat: sed voluntas et religio cor ejus ex eo in quo 
manebat originis vitio ad justificationum opera declinat. 

3 Jbid., Litt. XXU. 6 (M. ΙΧ. 641). Scit sub peccati origine et sub peccati 
lege se esse natum. ; 


T. 22 


338 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. | CHAP. 


the soul through its union with the flesh. Hilary abandons 
Tertullian’s theory of the mode of propagation of sin, but he 
fails to present us with one in its place. He preserves Ter- 
tullian’s inference whilst rejecting his premiss. And he 
consequently reverts almost to the indefiniteness of thought 
which obtained before Tertullian wrote. 

And what thus applies to Hilary’s treatment of hereditary 
sin applies equally to his statements as to our unity with 
Adam. Adam stands for the race, and his sin is theirs; but 
how or why, Hilary does not define”. 

Hilary thus contributed nothing to the elaboration of the 
doctrine of the Fall; he merely handed on something of the 
tradition already established. 


Ambrose. 


With Ambrose the case is very different. This Father’s 
writings represent a distinct and considerable step onwards 
towards the fulness of the Augustinian doctrines of the Fall 
and Original Sin. 

Ambrose, in the first place, supplies Augustine with 
suggestions for his exaltation of the original estate of Adam 
before the Fall. It has already been shown that the most 
ancient Jewish haggada, Palestinian and Alexandrian alike, 


1 See, ¢.g., the following passages : 

Comm. in Matt. X. 23 (M. IX. 976). Nam ut corpori anima data est, ita et 
potestas utrique utendi se ut vellet indulta est; atque ob id lex est proposita 
voluntati. Sed hoc in illis deprehenditur, qui primi a Deo figurati sunt, in quibus 
coeptae originis ortus effectus est, non traductus aliunde. Sed ex peccato atque 
infidelitate primi parentis, sequentibus generationibus coepit esse corporis nostri 
pater peccatum, mater animae infidelitas; ab his enim ortum per transgressionem 
primi parentis accepimus. 

bid. X. 24. Cum ergo innovamur baptismi lavacro per verbi virtutem, ab. 
originis nostrae peccatis atque auctoribus separamur ; recisique quadam ex sectione 
gladii Dei, a patris et matris affectionibus dissidemus: et veterem cum peccatis 
atque infidelitate sua hominem exuentes, et per Spiritum anima et corpore 
innovati, necesse est ut ingeniti et vetusti operis consuetudinem oderimus. 

2 Jbid. XVill. 6 (M. IX. 1020). Ovis una homo intelligendus est, et sub 
homine uno, universitas sentienda est. Sed in unius Adae errore omne hominum 
genus aberravit; ergo nonaginta novem non errantes, multitudo angelorum 
coelestium opinanda est.... 

Tract. in Psalm. lix. 4 (M. 1X. 385). Quia ex uno in omnes sententia mortis 
et vitae labor exiit. 


xu] 72 the Fathers before Augustine 5330 


had endowed the life of our first parents in Paradise with 
celestial privileges ; and doubtless such literature, familiar to 
many of the Fathers, was the original source of the doctrine 
as to man’s state before the Fall which grew up during the 
first three centuries. It has also been suggested that the 
Cappadocian Fathers were probably led to their exalted 
conception of the primitive state by Origen’s allegorical in- 
terpretation of the Fall-story, by which he supported his 
speculations as to a previous celestial life of human souls. 
Certainly the tendency to regard unfallen Adam as almost 
a heavenly being is conspicuous in the writings of those 
Fathers, and from them doubtless the like tendency was 
derived by Ambrose. Moreover Ambrose drank at one of the 
original founts of such fancies, the writings of Philo’. 

The Fall is said by Ambrose to have involved the loss of 
the divine image’. ὃ 

More important than his teaching as to the Fall itself, in 
which there is nothing original, is Ambrose’s contribution to 
the doctrine of Original Sin. Consistently with the method 


1 As examples of Ambrose’s teaching with regard to Adam’s condition in 
Paradise the following passages may be given: 

In Psalm. cxviii. Serm. xv. 36 (M. XV. 1422). Adam, cum in Paradiso esset, 
ceelestis erat, post lapsum autem terrenus est factus. 

Jord. iv. 3. Qui ante beatissimus auram carpebat aethere. 

De Parad. 42 (M. χιν. 294). Sunt enim qui putant mandatum istud (de 
manducando et non manducando) convenire caeli et terrae atque omnium Creatori; 
nequaquam dignum incolis paradisi, eo quod illa vita similis angelorum sit. Et 
ideo non terrenum et corruptibilem hunc cibum esui fuisse possumus aestimare. 

Ambrose’s dependence on Philo is shown, as Siegfried’ has pointed out in his 
well-known work on Philo, in his distinction between the heavenly and the earthly 
man, the latter πεπλασμένος and the former κατ᾽ εἰκόνα : De Parad. 5 (M. XIV. 
273). In hoc Paradiso hominem Deus posuit quem plasmavit. Intellige etiam 
quia non eum hominem qui secundum imaginem Dei est, posuit, sed eum qui 
secundum corpus. Incorporalis enim in loco non est. It is still more plainly 
shown, and in this case acknowledged by Ambrose himself, in his representation 
of the Fall as a seduction of the reason by means of sensuousness. Siegfried 
cites De Parad. 11. Delectatione (ἡδονῇ) deceptam per sensum (αἴσθησιν) mentem 
(vodv) asseruit Scriptura. 

2 Hexaemer. vi. 7 (M. XIV. 258). Secundum hance imaginem Adam factus est 
ante peccatum ; sed ubi lapsus est, deposuit imaginem coelestis, sumpsit terrestris 
efigiem. Cf. Jz Luc.x. Angelos tenebrarum, velut latrones, indumentis gratiae 
salutaris hominem spoliasse...where the unfallen state is regarded as a state of 
grace as contrasted with a state of nature. 


λύσω. 


340 Lhe Doctrine of the Fall etc. {CHAP. 


hitherto generally adopted in the present account of patristic 
teaching, we may endeavour to collect separately, so far as is 
possible, the passages in the writings of Ambrose which deal 
respectively with the hereditary sinful state caused by Adam’s 
sin, and the means of its transmission, on the one hand, and 
those which describe mankind’s unity with Adam, and partici- 
pation in his sin and guilt, on the other. 

Ambrose was cited by Augustine as an upholder of here- 
ditary corruption’. And indeed this doctrine is frequently 
asserted in his writings. More, perhaps than any Father 
before him, Ambrose emphasises the sinful condition of 
mankind and regards sin rather as a state than an act. In 
this respect he certainly prepared the way for S. Augustine 
and doubtless helped that Father to his profound sense of the 
depravity of human nature. 

Ambrose, like the majority of ecclesiastical writers, did not 
adopt Tertullian’s traducianist ideas, which indeed seem to 
have obtained little hold upon the ancient Church*?. On the 
contrary, Ambrose seems definitely to incline to the creation- 
ist theory of the origin of souls* His utterances on the 
subject of inherited taint recall the language of Origen at 
times*. That is to say, they in some cases seem to refer the 


1 In his De Peccato Original, c. xli. (c. 47 in E. tr. of Marcus Dods). 

One passage which Augustine quoted is taken from a lost exposition of Isaiah: 
Omnis enim homo mendax; et nemo sine peccato nisi unus, Deus. Servatum 
est igitur, ut ex viro et muliere, id est, per illam corporum commixtionem, nemo 
videatur expers esse delicti. Qui autem expers delicti, expers est etiam hujusmodi 
conceptionis. This passage seems to connect hereditary sin with concupiscence 
and generation. 

Another passage adduced by S. Austin is the following : 

Omnes homines sub peccato nascimur, quorum ipse ortus in vitio est sicut 
habes lectum, dicente David: Ecce in iniquitatibus conceptus sum, et in delictis 
peperit me mater mea. Ideo Pauli caro corpus mortis erat, sicut ipse ait: Quis 
me liberabit de corpore mortis hujus? Christi autem caro damnavit peccatum, 
quod nascendo non sensit, quod moriendo crucifixit; ut in carne nostra esset 
justificatio per gratiam, ubi erat ante colluvio per culpam. 

2 Jerome regarded Tertullian, perhaps in part on account of his traducianism, as 
no ‘homo ecclesiae.” The former Father’s influence was largely responsible for the 
decay of traducianist opinion, such as there was, in the West. 

3 See, e.g., De bono mortis, 9, De Parad. 11, and the explicit statement in 
De Noe et arca1V. 9: Quia ex nullo homine generantur animae. 

4 e.g. Apol. David, 11 (M. χιν. 873). Antequam nascamur, maculamur contagio ; 
et ante usuram lucis, originis ipsius excipimus injuriam, in iniquitate concipimur : 


xu] 7 the Fathers before Augustine 5341 


pollution of which they speak to the process of birth itself, as 
if conception were unclean. Possibly, however, the meaning 
is: no act of conception and birth is free from sin because no 
parents are free’ from sin. Though traducianist modes of 
accounting for the transmission of sinful taint are excluded, 
Ambrose always seems to regard heredity as the means of its 
propagation’. 

Ambrose appears, like others before him, to regard the 
inborn taint, which every man inherits, as something distinct 
from sin to which guilt attaches, and as something not cleansed 
away in baptism, which, he asserts, removes the guilt of 
personal or actual sin. Whereas Cyprian spoke of ‘another’s 
sins’ being remitted to infants in baptism, Ambrose, in one 
passage, speaks of Adam’s sin as not ours, and as something 
for which we need fear no punishment’. 

Adam’s sin is indeed spoken of very differently in passages 
soon to be quoted; but here original sin is considered, 


non expressit, utrum parentum, an nostra. Et in delictis generat unumquemque 
mater sua: nec hic declaravit, utrum in delictis suis mater pariat; an jam sint et 
aliqua delicta nascentis. Sed vide, ne utrumque intelligendum sit. Nec conceptus 
iniquitatis exsors est, quoniam et parentes non carent lapsu. Et si nec unius diei 
infans sine peccato est, multo magis nec illi materni conceptus dies sine peccato 
sunt. Concipimur ergo in peccato parentum et in delictis eorum nascimur. Sed 
et ipse partus habet contagia sua, nec unum tantummodo habet ipsa natura 
contagium. 

The passages of Scripture cited in this context are those to which Origen 
so frequently appealed. 

1 In Psalm. xxxviii. (Migne XIv. 1053) we read: ipsa noxiae conditionis 
haereditas adstrinxit ad culpam. 

* Enarr. in Psalm. x\viii. ἢ. 8 and g (M. XIv. 1158 ff.). Alia est iniquitas 
nostra, alia calcanei nostri, in quo Adam dente serpentis est vulneratus, et 
obnoxiam haereditatem successionis humanae suo vulnere dereliquit, ut omnes 
eo vulnere claudicemus. 

Again: Dominus autem qui sua peccata non habuit, nec cognovit proprias 
iniquitates, ait: Jguztas calcanet met circumdabit me; hoc est, iniquitas Adae, 
non mea. Sed ea non potest mihi esse terrori; in die enim judicii nostra in nobis, 
non alienae iniquitatis flagitia, puniuntur. Unde reor iniquitatem calcanei magis 
lubricum delinquendi, quam reatum aliquem nostri esse delicti. Meritoque 
Dominus qui pro nobis universa suscepit : Lavemus, inquit, et pedes, ut calcanei 
lubricum possumus auferre...et non metuat lubricum haereditatis, qui cupit vesti- 
gium tenere virtutis. Iniquitas ergo calcanei nostri praevaricatio est Adae.... 

The following passage is also of interest here: 

Habebat enim primi hominis de successione peccatum...ideo planta ejus 
abluitur ut haereditaria peccata tollantur; nostra enim propria per baptismum 
relaxantur—WDe A/yster. 32 (M. XVI. 398). 


342 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. [ΟΗΑΡ: 


apparently, solely in one aspect, namely as consisting in 
natural concupiscence ; the z#zguttas calcanei is, in fact, identi- 
fied here with Adam’s sin on the one hand, and with con- 
cupiscence or sinful tendency on the other. In this context 
Ambrose appears to be combating the notion that concupis- 
cence is sin. He is therefore here rather in harmony with 
Origen, and perhaps with Tertullian and other earlier Fathers, 
than with the teaching soon to be formulated by Augustine. 

Turning now to the solidarity of the race with Adam, we 
find Ambrose making advances upon previous thought in the 
direction of S. Augustine’s mode of conceiving our participa- 
tion in Adam’s sin. Ambrose teaches, indeed, as plainly as 
Augustine himself, that we all were Adam, and in Adam, and 
sinned in Adam’. Such statements imply, of course, that 
Adam’s gzzl/¢ is ours also. This is definitely asserted, too, by 
Ambrose?, Such guilt is not merely imputed, according to 
this Father, as earlier writers seemed to imply, without show- 
ing any justification for its imputation. It was actually 
incurred by us because we sinned in and with Adam. Lastly, 
we find already stated in Ambrose the idea that Adam’s sin 
is ours because it was not merely the sin of himself as an 
individual man, but because he was human nature, and there- 
fore the first transgression of the first man was the sin of 
human nature in general. This idea, in slightly varying 
forms, dominated Christian thought concerning original sin 
and its derivation throughout the middle ages’. 


* * * ¥ 


1 In Luc. xv. 24 (M. XV. 1762). Fuit Adam et in illo fuimus omnes ; periit 
Adam et in illo omnes perierunt. 

Apol. David, 71. Omnes in primo homine peccavimus et per naturae success- 
ionem culpae quoque ab uno in omnes transfusa est successio. 

De Exc. Pat. ii. 6. Lapsus sum in Adam, de Paradiso ejectus in Adam, 
mortuus in Adam; quomodo non revocat nisi me in Adam invenerit, ut in illo 
culpae obnoxium, morti debitum, ita in Christo justificatum. 

The following passages occur in the Commentary on S. Luke: 

Cave ergo ne ante nuderis, sicut Adam ante nudatus est, mandati coelestis 
custodia destitutus et exutus fidei vestimento et sic lethale vulnus accepit, in quo 
omne genus occidisset humanum, nisi Samaritanus ille descendens vulnera ejus 
acerba curasset...... Adam atque Eva primi illi nostri ut generis ita erroris parentes. 

2 De Cain et Abel, τ. 1 (M. XIV. 315). Illa penes auctores non stetit culpa. 

3 Ambrosiaster should be mentioned as a precursor of S. Augustine. The 


ΧΙΠ] 254 the Fathers before Augustine 543 


Ambrose is the last Father to whom we can have recourse 
for light as to the sources of the doctrines of the Fall and 
Original Sin; for it has been assumed all through this work 
that, notwithstanding later developments and deviations in 
the theology of various branches of the Church, these doctrines 
practically took their permanent and fully matured form in 
the writings of S. Augustine. The title of the present volume 
will sufficiently explain the exclusion of S. Augustine’s work 
from its contents. Moreover so many treatises dealing with 
this great teacher’s doctrine of Sin have been supplied by the 
ablest writers on the history of dogma, that it would be as 
unnecessary as it would be presumptuous to offer here any 
minute analysis or description of an intricate system of 
doctrine, the main outlines of which are familiar to all students 
of theology. 

The main results of the foregoing inquiry into the sources 
of the patristic doctrine of the Fall may therefore now be 
summarised. 

It has been seen that though Judaism, in the earliest 
Christian centuries, possessed definite theories of Original Sin, 
these were not taken over in their Jewish form by the Fathers 
of the Church. The doctrine of the Fall, as a whole, was 
deduced afresh? 5S. Paul was, of course, the connecting link 
between Jewish and Christian teaching on this point. His 
doctrine of Adam was derived from the Jewish schools; and 
it served to mould, to a considerable extent, the subsequent 
thought of the Fathers. But the ecclesiastical doctrines of 
the Fall and Original Sin were not deduced from 5. Paul’s 
brief statements on these subjects ; in fact they were not con- 
tained therein. Irenaeus, in whom a Christian doctrine of the 
Fall first appears, seems to have been guided to his view of 


following citation from him will serve to illustrate that he shared with Ambrose 
the preparation for the final elaboration of the Augustinian doctrine. 

Zn Rom, v. 12 (M. XVII. 92). In quo...omnes peccaverunt ;...manifestum 
itaque est in Adam omnes peccasse quasi in massa. Ipse enim per peccatum 
corruptus, quos genuit omnes nati sunt sub peccato. Ex eo igitur cuncti pecca- 
tores, quia ex eo ipso sumus omnes. 

1 Of course many details of non-essential character, relating to the original 
estate of Adam, the tempter, and particular losses occasioned by the Fall, were 
borrowed directly from Judaism. 


344 The Doctrine of the Fall etc. |CHAP. 


the connexion between the sinful race and its first parent by 

“tis doctrine of Recapitulation. The passage Rom. v. 12 ff. 
was used to confirm the results thus obtained, but does not 
appear to have been the starting point whence Irenaeus 
set out. 

Immediately later than Irenaeus, we have the practically 
simultaneous appearance of two definite theories, at once 
explaining the nature of hereditary taint and the mode of 
its propagation, and also accounting for the virtual participa- 
tion of the race in Adam’s sin. ‘Tertullian, in the West, 
seems to have been enabled to furnish the very concrete and 
definite hypothesis contained in his writings by the traducian- 

+ ist psychology which he borrowed from heathen philosophers. 
In spite of his own protestations, we must consider Stoicism 
the main factor in his theory of the propagation of sin from 
Adam; without this external aid, his ideas as to original sin 
would probably have been more akin to the much less definite 
notions of Irenaeus. Origen, in the East, does not set out 

~ from S. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, nor yet from the 
position attained by Irenaeus. Entirely new influences seem 
to have guided his mind towards the acceptance of a view 
essentially identical with that later elaborated by Augustine. 
And these influences again were quite different from those 
which enabled Tertullian to advance, to so marked an extent, 
upon Irenaeus. ‘The traditional practice of infant baptism in 
the Church, and certain Old Testament passages relating to , 
inherent sinfulness and to the impurity attributed by the Law 
to human birth, appear to have suggested to Origen’s mind 
the idea of hereditary taint of sin attaching to all men; and 
in casting about for an explanation of this, he would seem to 
have come upon the truth of racial solidarity as expressed by 
S. Paul, and to have proceeded to formulate that solidarity in 
terms of the notion of mankind’s potential (seminal) existence 
in their first father, just as the writer of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews regarded Levi as existing, and paying tithe, in 
Abraham. 

Such, then, are the sources, in so far as they are avowed 
in the writings of the pre-Augustinian Fathers, or are to be 
inferred from them. After Tertullian and Origen but little 


ἱ 


xu] 2,2 the Fathers before Augustine 545 


development was needed, save in the elaboration of details 
and the thinking out of consequences, to carry speculation 
with regard to the Fall and Original Sin onward to the point 
attained by S. Augustine. Such development proceeded 
uniformly in the West, Tertullian’s results being generally 
accepted, though the means whereby, in the main, they were 
reached, 2.5. his traducianist ideas, were rejected. In the East 
where, it should be noted, the essential ideas of the Augus- 
tinian theory had been formulated as early as in the West, 
development was more interrupted. Teachers in the age 
subsequent to that of Origen neglected the doctrine of the 
Fall and Original Sin contained in this Father’s later writings, 
and relapsed into the indefiniteness of thought characteristic 
of Irenaeus and the Greek apologists. The Cappadocians, 
however, and Gregory of Nyssa in particular, supply a link 
between the fully-developed doctrine of Augustine and its 
germ which had long before appeared in Origen. 

Finally, if the results thus summarised be essentially 
correct, an important conclusion may be drawn which the 
present writer has ventured to presuppose elsewhere, and has 
here sought to justify: “that the _development of the highly 
complicated doctrine of Original Sin was less s the outcome of 
strict exegesis than due to the exercise of speculation: s specu- 
lation working, indeed, on the lines laid down in Scripture, 
but applied to such material as current science and philosophy 
- were able to afford’.” 


1 The author’s Hulsean Lectures, Ὁ. 41. 


ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. 


PAGES 38 AND 40. 


SincE Chapter II. was printed a work has appeared which con- 
tains new information relating to Babylonian traditions concerning 
Paradise or Eden and making it perhaps necessary to qualify the 
statement made on p. 49: ‘‘It may be safely concluded, then, that 
we possess no Babylonian parallel to the Hebrew Fall-story.” The 
work in question is Pinches’ Zhe Old Testament in the light of the 
historical records and legends of Assyria and Babylonia. On pp. 71 
and 75 ff. of this book will be found evidence that the tree of Eridu, 
compared to ‘white lapis,’ was probably a vine. For instance, we 
are told that the ideograms composing the word for ‘wine’ are 
‘drink of life,’ and those composing the word for ‘the vine’ are 
‘tree of the drink of life.’ What is said on p. 72 ff. makes it over- 
whelmingly probable that the scenery of the Paradise described in 
Gen. ii—iii. is derived from Babylonia. 

Further, on p. 77 an inscription is mentioned in which it is 
narrated that certain persons or gods wished to obtain possession of 
the ‘tablets of the gods’ containing the secrets of heaven and earth. 
These persons or gods seem, in the record, to possess themselves of 
the tablets, and to have broken off branches of ‘the cedar beloved 
᾿ of. the great gods.’ The text afterwards speaks of someone who did 
not keep the commandment of Samas (the Sun-god) and Rimmon 
(the wind-god), and continues : “Τὸ the place of He’, Samas, Marduk, 
and Nin-Edina (Lord of Eden) which (is) the hidden place (?) of 
heaven and earth, the band (lit. number) of the companions must 
not approach for deciding the decision ; the message of the decision 
they shall not reveal; their hands (shall not touch ?) the cedar tree 
beloved of the great gods.” 


1 A stream connected with the paradise at Eridu. 


Additions and Corrections 347 


One desires, of course, the criticism of experts on this rendering 
of the inscription to which Dr Pinches refers, before building upon 
it. But if it has, on the whole, been rightly interpreted, it would 
seem that Babylonian literature furnishes us with a parallel to the 
tree of knowledge as well as with a parallel to the tree of life, and 
also, apparently, with a story akin to the narrative of the Fall. 


PAGES 49 AND 092. 


For F. Delitzsch vead Friedrich Delitzsch. 


PAGES? rt: 


Before the title of the Apocalypse of Baruch zvsert IX. 


PAGE 220. 


Before the title 4-Ezra (2 Esdras) imsert X. 


OF 


Gen. 1. 


li. 


lil. 


iv. 


BNIDASD (OND I eatays ytd the: 


THE BIBLE, AND OF JEWISH PSEUDEPIGRAPHIC 
AND RABBINIC WRITINGS. 


OLD TESTAMENT. 


PAGE j; 

26 104, 138 | Gen .iv. 11 

27 104 | 13 
31 OT ep 16 

4 ff. 20, 36 f. Ase 
ey 20; 37, vi. I-4 
Oc a7 4 

aes 170 3 

3 18, 19 5 
Glee 18, 41 5 ff. 
10-14 15. 27.237 [2 
ree, 18 f. 30 | Vili. 21 
her .«+ 30, 118, 120 | ἼΣΟΣ: 
22'S. 21 20-27 
24.. 26, 41 | 25 
255 = τὰ 155 xi. I-9 
I-19 oS ins ri ee Bp 6-8 
3 τὰς τ ἘΝ Ὁ 18 xlil. 10 

5 τ a2 ΤΕ Onn ΧΡ. 23 
9 ore re ἊΣ 7 ΙΧ" 
16 or $s +a 7 ἡδίς, ὅλος. 
7 ἐπὶ Ue Ps 530 xxv. 26 
17-19 445 sf aS XXvl. IO 
19 ἘΣ τς ere RR ES: XXXVIll. 21 
20 “by! τ Γ 2 2407 χοῦ xx.) & 
21 τ ehh ELS XXXll. 33 
22 15, 18, 25, 64, 72, 118 XXXlV. 7 
22-24 : 18 | Levit. xvili. 23 
24 ye xe hcg ee xe 15,10 
7 ἐς eis yt OO7 eNO oxi. 32 
9 He We a 7 XXi. I4 


PAGE 

7 

160 

64 

At Ἐπ ΟΣ 
It, 94, 96, 120, 128, 
132, 181 ff. 202, 236 f. 
vee “oe Is 
98 f. 103 

IO 

το 

10, 98, 103 

Ὁ ΣΙ 


390 


Deut. v. 9 
Vli. 10 
ΧΧΙΠ 17 

18 

xxiv. 16 

ΧΧΥΊΙ. 26 
XX1X. 29 
eet tise 
19 
ΧΧΧΙ. 21 

Josh. x. 13 

Jud. ix. 8 ff. 

1 Sam. viii. 6 

12 


“, 


2 Sam. i. 18 


ἘΣΤΕ ite 
RLV elit. 

1 Kings ii. 33 
vill. 46 
ΧΥΙ. 1 

2 Kings v. 27 
xiv. 6 

g-10 

τ Chron, ΧΕΙ Ὶ 
XXVill. 9 
xxix. 18 

2 Chron. vi. 36 

Job iv.017 a5. 


χχν: 4 
XXVill. 21 
ΧΧΧΙ 52 
XXXIV. ΤΡ 
XXXVlli. 15 
Psal. viii. 6 
XXXV1. I 
XXXIX. 5 
xliv. 25 
xlvi. 4 
lies 
lviil. 3 
1xxx. 


Index of Passages 


295; 


Iol, 


IOI, 103, 295, 299, 


PAGE 
100 
100 


39 
231 
100 
163 

16 
207 
207 
103 


IOI 


SALA Ix απο 


7 


ΧΟ 
ΟΠ ΤΙ 
ὌΣΣΧΗ ἢ 
cxlili. 2 
Prov. iii. 18 
Vili. 22 ff. 
ed 
xi. 30 
xiii, 12 
14 
Xiv. 27 
See Oises 
Eccles. i. 2 
Vil. 20 
29 
te eae 
xitee7 
Isai ales. 
7-22 
ili. 1-4 
Vv. I-7 
Tits 
VileeLy 
xo 12H, 
33 
ΧΙ if, 
ΣΙΝ ἢ 
13 
13 ff. 
21 
ΧΧΙΙ 7-II 
XXiv. 21 


XXVill. 26 ff. ... 


XXXVil. 24 
xliii. 27 


xviii. 8 
li. 3 
Ixi. 5... 
Ixv. 25 
Jer. xiv. 20 
χν το 
xvii. 9 
xxi. 8 
ΧΧΊΙΣ 25. 530 
xxiii. 18 
XXV1. 15 


27, 28 ... 


64, 199 


EV ἘΧΧῚ 20. τοῦ 
33 an 


XXxli. 18 ἘΠ 
ἐστον, τὰ, τὸ κεν ὯΝ 
Ezek. xvi. gee 


XVil. 2-IO ... 
XVIll. 2-4... 


XXVlil. na 
τ΄ 
τ} τὸ 

CR ἐν ὙΠ 
8 ae 


eB he 


XXXVi. 26 ἊΝ 


ἘΠ ΡΝ 


epigraphic Writings 


Tob. iii. 1-6 hip 
iv. 12 : 
xiv. 4 ff. am 

Wisd. i. 11 ἫΝ 
ὶ pike. ley 

13 ne 
14 hs 
1125. 21 


1|1. 1 ἢ re 
τό" ΜῈ 


ἵν. 10-14 ... 


19 nee 


eee ae = 
LAW ἘΣ: 
ΡΣ ys Ane 
Wills 10, Ζῶ 
20 re 
21 7 
x33 ΕΣ 
Lees 

ἘΠΕῚ 2 : 

etd a : 
xli. 10 ne 
ΤῸ ΤΊ 
xiv. 6 aa 

xv. II 

Ecclus. iii. 21-24 
Warsi: ee 


PAGE 
Be) date 
ees DES 
. 100 
ec ἐν 


arn ἘΝ 


et 09 
16, 63f. 81 


Index of Passages 


ἘΞ loa meets ay 


View vier: τες 
Willa 59. ἢ yes 
Reels ΕΝ 
ΧΙ nel 
Rea ps AEP 
Χὶν. 7 ps 
Joel ii. 3 
Amos ix. 8 ie 
13 


Obad. Io ... ee 

WIC La versa ep 
Vil. 17 

Zech. xiii. 5 


APOCRYPHA. 


2 Esdras, see 4 Ezra, under Pseud- 


182 


i260 
τε 
cement 24. 

124 ff. 
i ier 


124 f., 127, 281 
104, 124, 125, 128, 184, 


246 
124, 126 

124 

126 
re ἀνῇ 
Ser be ts 
kee 
127, 120 
τοῦ 
ΤῸ 
Fp ett 
sua On. 
et at 
128, 130 

130 
140, 144 
SE. 
ἜΤΟΣ 
ems 20 
ast) τοῦ 


τ ΟΤΤΝ 


ECCIUS τ ἐῶ ΠΟ ὡς 


Vii. 15 ae 
Vill. 5 δὰ 
ἐξ. ἔξ CED ee 
XIV. 7 


Veer 
14 ff. 
ΤῊ ae 
ἘΝῚ ἢ at 
xvii. I ff. 


on ae 


12 ES 
21 ἊΣ 
ΧΣΙΟ 7 
XXlil. 24 a 


AEVeC see TIT, 


Xxvil. 6 Pa 

XXX. 25 awe 

ἈΣΧΧΊΪ 12. 16 
rower. 


eRe tars ete 


ΧΙ ΤΙ ary 

abel os met 

5 =~ 

xliv. 2 ἀνὰ 

18 noe 

xlvil. 20 ap 
xlix. 16 ve 
Bar. ili. 26 ee 


PAGE 

: LOO 
ΞΡ er OL 
a 15, 16 
: τό 

me iO? 


: : 100 
me 30 

: 500 
Ὡς ἜΝ 151 


AL 

ΕΣ tok 
iy ΤΙ 7 

ἀξ er Ys 
ees eel EG 
ae Nine Le Be 
eee 

ine tee Teka 
tod 

TOs SLI SA1 17,11 20 
ace 05 
τὰ Ae 1720 
ἐξ 116, 117 
wre seis 
Ty paced EE 


113. 117, 1105, 121) 
162 
ἘΝ fen 110 


iit τοῦ 
9G: or) eae 
te se) Ἰοὺ 
AP Peel iO 
<P St 20 
ide eet tO 
nee mat tt 
ate we. 120 
τ Cae tO 
ἊΣ weal Cx 
os 207, 242 
Rae ΠΝ 82 


Index of Passages 


NEW TESTAMENT. 


PAGE PAGE 
Matt. vil. 11 248 | Rom. viii. 22 224 
XV. 19 169 | © Cor. xv. 22 dist 160 
Luke xi. 13 248 45 252, 270 
John ii. 25 ine 245 |) 2 Coty. ra rae s05 
11 nee 248, 333 15 257 
bt Cee 265 Ney bee 209 
Rom. ill. 23 ποῖ Ase nie ABO 1 8] ἐν: 252 
V. 12-21 172, 220, 251-258, 261, 17-24 268 
262, 266, 270, 289, 294, | Eph. 1. 10 .. 288 
300, 344 1055 ἘΠῚ: 252, 271 
15, ss ἐξ 264 Iv. 22, 23 169 
IQ.. 263 | Col. iii, 1 See 457 
vi. 12 ff 268 | ἢ Tim. ii. 13-15 160, 209 
Vil sees. 271 THeleevit. 9,° 10. 2. 166, 261 
5 Ἧ ας 6η 1.185. ὙΠ 1Ξ 169 
7-25 282, 207, 200.) ΤΕ ἡ 69 
Q-iI 19651 “@ Pete. 4 1go 
ΤΙ 255 | 1 Johni. 8 248 
Vill sees 252 | Jude 6 Igo 
3 Be bye Pesta relly sy; 540 
4-9 208 Mile) 43, 249 
18 ff. ee peer ke ἜΣ ΞΤΙΝ 2: ΓΗ͂ 38,.249 
20 τ 4% 224, 302 
RABBINICAL WRITINGS (TALMUD TARGUMS 
AND MIDRASHIM). 

Aboda Zara TRI, 137; 230 VL esinia 165, 213 


Aboth di R. Nathan Pirke Aboth 


Pirke di R. Elieser 


151-153, 157, 
158, 171. 17 


108, 113, 149 


152,154, 158, 159, 


Arachin ... on 163, 231 230.345, 340 
Baba Bathra 113, 164, 171, 175, 213 | Sabbath : 157, 162,.164, 175 
Bammidbar Rabba 155, 174 | Sanhedrin 181, 15 ὙΡΗῚ 125; sy 
Beracoth ... 156, 163, 170 | Schemoth Rabba... 163, 166 
Bereschith Rabba 41, 150-156, 160, | Siphra 165 

162, 165, 171, 220 | Siphre το, 165 
Debarim Rabba ... : τ 1059) ote ων 153 
Erubin ΠΥΡῚ 150: ULES {ΠἘτ 51) 173 
Jalkut, see Yalkut Schim Sukkah A eseLTs 
Jebamoth ... . 40, 157 | Tanchuma 150, 163, 171 
Joma ἡμὴ ..» 175 | Targum Jerus. 10, 63, 149 
Kiddusch ... $7 E70, 175 of Onkelos . 10, 63, 149 
Koheleth Rabba ... 165, 174, 231 | Tosefta συ]... ef" ER 
Nedarim ... 174 | Yalkut Schim... 151, 158, 159, 165 


Index of Passages Ἔ 


JEWISH 


Abraham, Apocalypse of, c. 22 
do. PH EU OES 


Ls 


PAGE 


156 
104 


Testament of ; 195 
Adam, Apocalypse of, c. 3 ΟῚ 
Book of, see Apocalypse of 

Moses 
History of the Creation etc. 
οὐ τς fh ah 201 
History οἱ the Expulsion of 2025 
History of the Repentance of 202 
Life of, ce. 12-17 τοῦ 
Story of the Conversation bf 
see Apocalypse of Moses 
Adam and Eve, Book of, see Con- 
flict of Adam and Eve 
{ΟΠ Πιοῖ Ol, 12st Ὁ hoes 
ae nae Pon ae dy oy 200 
Testament of, see Apocalypse 
of Adam 
Aser, Testament of 
fz as ... I16, 160, TO1, 208 
v. her ee ae yee τὸ 
Baruch, Apocalypse of (Greek) 
ce, ae ae 7 202 f. 
Se mee a ΕΠ 7108; 2051 
_Baruch, Apocalypse of (Syrzac) 
2. 2 213 
1e2.17 217 
XVli. 3 204 
XVlli. I, 2 216, 220 
XIX. 208 
xIx. 8 214 
exits Δ ΝΣ ee T1Q, 214 
xlvill. 40 219 
42-3 a17 ff. 
liv. I4 220 
15 a ἘΠ 220, 221 
ἜΣΤΙΝ ehee = ary, 221 
19 214, 220 
21 .» τ hs, bye! 
lvi. 6 ff. ἘΣ ae 14502 15 
ΤΟ 213 
inxs, 1xxt. 230 
Dan, Testament of, v. Igo 


Ot 
oOo 


POE UDEPIGCKRARH IG GW RELLNGS, 


PAGE 
Enoch, Book of (Aethropic) 
Visage’ ὥς ἊΣ ee τ85 
Willows. ga Ses SetOS 
το (δ᾽ σου 182 
Xeuys o 182 
EE Ὁ 183 
Ἐν Ὁ ΠῚ [82 
δίς, ἢ Ὁ 183 
XIX, 2 a Ohad 
XLV Ves ὙΠ 70, 187 
exve ἢ ae oe: pee TS 7 
XXKiL es ae elt ΕἾ 14 
ate 186 
TS 
liv. 6 188 
Ixiv. 2 188 
Ixv. 6-8 kits) 
Ixix. 6 183, 184, 189 
6-12 189 
II 189 
Eee eshte τς ag. τὺ- 
᾿σχτιν ον. γῇ: Seni o£ 
ἜΦΑΝ, 5: τ τὰς π΄ τὸ 
XCVI. 4 184 Τὴ 
Cede it τος : ρῶς ἦδος 
Enoch, Book of one 
Wij lees =H ee 205 
qed hay ASE ae ἐπε e200 
axa 4 or cn ee 200 
xxii. I 151 
Xxlil. § I 43 
ἱόφος 4, 206 
xxx. 8 ff. 207 
[1 207 
{τ τὸ 143 
18 Bice (200 
XXX1l. 2 δ 208, 213 
eee Sys 207 
4 206 
6 208 
ΧΧΧΙ 1... ... 208 
xl. 1 ff. ΝΣ a 209, 2UI 
xlii 211 
xliv. 1 208 


25 


994 


Enoch, Book of the Secrets of, see 
Enoch, Book of (S/avoztc) 


2 Esdras, see 4 Ezra 


Ezra, Apocalypse of, see 4 Ezra 


4 Ezra iii. 4 ff. 


Vile 11, 12 


127-131 ... 
140 
Vill. I 
3 
30 
56-62 
ΧΗ 
16 
αν pepe i 
xi. 46 ae 
Job, Apocalypse of 
Job, Testament of 
Jubilees, Book of, iii. 15 
ili. 28 
29 


Wises 


246, 


wo nN 


τὸ 
Ww 


τὸ 
.- 


nb YN N 
[9] 


Ww OY 


τὸ 


ts to NS ὦ NOES ON NO Ww 68 
ce) 


Oe O 


Yn NY WY CO ND 
"ὦ 


WwW ὦ. 
Or0 


Index of Passages 


Jubilees, Book of, iv. 22 ey ἔχ 

VERT "ἢ ἘΣ esi fe τ 

2 fi. oe ie LOS 

ΜῈ ον ai ἊΣ ΟΣ 

ἐφ 21) fis) es τς ΤΟΣ 

26-39 ... ks Mato 

X. I-I5 i: oe ave, MIG? 

ΧΕ, 0 bees ney ey Rte 

Judah, Testament of, xx Ὁ 

Levi, Testament of, ili. ... ia) 190 

Vis we a6 a Be tor 

3 Maccabees ti. 4 er τὸ 

ill. 22 ee ars 140, [44 

4 Maccabees ii. 21 ve 144, 169 

Tithe as <a το pee 144 

xviii. 7-8... 144, 160, 197, 247 
Moses, Apocalypse of, see pp. 196 ff. 

xs τῶν τ ον EOS 

ti ee ἫΝ ἐξ ἄπ ἡ τον 

ἀν, ἢ ne im 198, 220 

RES tess or i ΤΌΣ 

oa ΤῸ ἐς ce pe Ae) 

MELV recs ie ἐν oe OT 

ἘΞ ν᾿ os: F oa oe. 4X07 

XXxXil. ἘΣ a mee alos 

XXXVI. ie of 198, 203 

Moses, Assumption of ... ne 05 

Naphthali, Testament of, ili. ... 190 


Noah, Apocalypse of (passages 
contained in Book of Enoch) 


189, 192 
Pseudo-Philo  ... as 7a) 164 
Reuben, Testament of, v. 184, 190 


Seth, Concerning the Good Tid- 
ings of ... be ae 202 
Sibylline Oracles, Bks. 1. and ii. 123 


Bk. viii. 399 f. ep ΤΠ 7208 
Solomon, Psalms of, ix. 7 τς: 
Testament of, xxi., xxVi. ... 190 
Treasure Cave, The ΤῊ 200 f. 


Vita Adae, see Life of Adam. 


INDEX 


PAGE 
Abbot, T. K. 271 
Abrahams 114 
Addis REET fs: 
Aeschylus τὰ van 52-3 
Ambrose 330,13 30. τς 
Ambrosiaster Pear 
Aphraates 152 
Aquinas ΤΕ, 211 
Aristobulus 252. 1η] 
Athanasius 310 ff. 
Athenaeus 50 
Athenagoras 282 
Aucher = τὸς 136 
Augustine,S. 150, 151 n. 6, 166, 214 


ΠῚ ocd 7 Nee 2:0 5202) τὐῦν 12} 
324 N- 2, 3352 340 


Baader a εν Bees oye: 
Bacher τοῦ; 146, 148 ff., 155 ff., 159, 


Ol 


Ι Ceriani 


AUTHORS. 


PAGE 
Biesenthal : 261 
Bigg 20 tt. 200 
Bohme on ‘hon tate 
Bois ΤΟ 122.1125, 64% 
Bonwetsch 143, 153, 156, 193, 205, 

209, 241, 308, 310 
Boscawen ... : Py a EG 
Bousset 177; ΤΟῚ 241 
Braun ὟΣ : omer Ab 
Bretschneider ΠΟ ΤΙ ΓΕ [ΤῸ 
Bruce FEO, ΔΙ 26 1 
Bruch = Ἐπ ΤΙΣ 
Budde On bei sit 7.157 Οὐ O05 

ΠΕ τ 206, 308, 316, 917 


Carpenter and Harford-Battersby 8, 17 

us τς fe 70 
Charles 119, 143, 181 ff., 204 ff., 212 ff., 
220, 227, 230 


160, 165, 170, 231 | Cheyne 18, 29, 57, 63, 79, 115 

Baethgen ... 26 | Chrysippus 331, 332 
Baldensperger ; a 180 | Chrysostom 32: 
Barton 26, 29, 25, 30, 41, 12; 44) δῖ; | Cicero 331 
69 ff., 95 Cleanthes ... : eat 

Basil 316 ff. | Clemen 5, 11, 12, 20, 90, 91, 95, 99; 
Baudissin . : 1 29, 40, 74 102, 212, 218, 226 
Beer 179, 179, 181, 191 Clement of Alexandria 291 ff., 297, 
Bengel : 256, 260 300, 316, 320, 335 
Bensly wey: | Clodd ; . τ Spiel We iy gs) 
Benzinger 31 | Cobb ae My Fe 69, 74 
Berhai ο... nae το πὴ ἢ (τὴ i 194 
Bernard, Canon E, R. go, 99 | Cohn and Wendland 132 
Berosus πὶ παν WOMTIOGE, ris os. 80 
Bertholet ... . 63 | Conybeare 190, 196-7 
Beyschlag ... * @&t, 253, 254 | Cornill yb 
Bezold_.... vids au Wi aor tox ἘΦ) 71 


350 


: PAGE 
Critical Review, The... re 6 
Cyprian - 335, 2301: 
Cyril of Πδταυ το: 308, 314 ff. 
Dahne Pati, 122, 10, ἘΠ. 
Dalman- os. “he ee Len 
Darmesteter Ge. εἰ ὁ 

Darwin ... τα Fas Bas gs) 
Davidson ... a =e rane Ate 
Davis a a ἜΣ remo iy 
Dawson, Sir J. Ww. ‘be we 77-8 
Deane τ 130 
Delitzsch, eget 49, 92 


Deliemee Franz . .. 61, 165, 182 


Derenbourg a σῷ ἘΠ 2:1 
Dieckmann τὰς sts ae 
Dillmann 13, 60, 64, 78, 82, 95, 195, 
200, 243 
Dinkart ... oe nn ἜΝ 
Dods, τε, ἐς ae <i) RAO 
Donaldson ee +e οὐ... τε 
Dorner~ ... Χο ἊΣ mye) ἴῆι 
Doughty ... τ: 2 A 
Driver : Ὑ 18 
Drummond, J. ... 110, 122, ae 142 
Duff Fo vi 5: tag 8 
Duncker ... Sas ἜΣ δ 1s, 
Edersheim Ifo; 112, ΤΙ, 115, 120] 
14? oid spaces s4,. 250, JOT, ΤΟΣ; 
230 
Eisenmenger 


49, 59 
ah 10, 30, 290, 


2.75.5 15 63, ΙΟΙ 


Encyclopaedia sepia a 


Encyclopaedia Britannica AS a 
Engelhardt ; Pye ak ha, 
Epiphanius 1 τεῦ τ πὴ 
Ephrem I51, 213 
Erbkam ... Me aes ees 
Etheridge ... 7 a TOG 
Eusebius ... 32, 43, 95, 151, 298, 310 
Ewald... ty ia 62, 109 
Fairbairn ... ede Me Wot hd 
Payer De. ἐν ἜΣ 212, 221 
Fergusson ... 33> 99, 74 
Firdtisi 55, 58 
Flemming and Radccmacher LOL 
Forlong ... τ a ΣΕ 


Index of Authors 


PAGE 
Frazer 50, 67, 70 
Friedlander ὟΣ oe anf Wek ad 
Fritzsche ... 108, 112, 115 
Fuchs ὌΝ Ἐπ Ἐν τοῦ 
Gfrorer 110, 142, 160 
Gibson... ἘΠῚ ΓΕ Pe ὉΠ 
Gifford... vA Pr Us 


Ginzberg 148, ἘΠῚ 162, 154, 1885: 180. 


τ 1521 3m 


Glaser δεν τς 27 
Goldziher ... 28, 30, 74 
Gomperz ... 8 ac ἐν τ ee 
Gratz 128, 180, 231 
Green + δ δ: ἐς 8 
Gregory (Great) ... ὌΡΕΙ 


of Nazianzus 


ἔων 331,445 
of Nyssa 214, 247, 316, 319 ff., 327, 


345 

Grimm τῷ 126, a 
Griinbaum zs ee 158, 2 
Gunkel 6, 8, 14, 16 ft 335 375 Bee ἐν 

1210} 61, 63, 04, 67, 80,7177, 225, 

241 
Hagenbach oa re Tey 
Hamburger 148, 149 
Hardwick 59, 60 
Harford- Battersby See sage 
Harlez, De te a 56 
Harnack 278, 279, 285, 287, “ti ait; 


313, 321, 327, 328, 335 

Hastings (Dictionary of the Bible) 8, 

14, 26, 29, 38, 42, 49, 90 f., 99, 122, 
189, 192, 221 


Hauck oe ae fee fe) eee 
Haupt εἷς 38, 40 
Hausrath ... as ΤῊΣ τς 0555 
Headlam, see Sanday 

Hegel τ σὰ δον ἫΝ 8 
Herder ... = τς τὰ ὃ 
Herodotus ane ie Pee 
Herriot IIo, 122 
Hershon ... 5 ee ἧς ΕΟ 
Hesiod . 52-3 
Hilary 336, 337 f. 
Hilgenfeld 177, 189, 226, 277 
Hilt 23 5 324 


Hoffding ... ἣν ἐς Bs SH 


Hoffmann ... 
Hofmann, Von 
Hogarth 
Holzinger ... 
Homer 
Hommel 

Horn 

Hort 


Ignatius 


Irenaeus 151, ΤΣ bee ΣΎ ΥΩ eats 


[ndex of Authors She 


PAGE 

61 

12 

nae Mee ete! 
ΒΤ 9 


296, 300, 305, 309, 310, 329 f., 332, 


344 
Issaverdens 


James 


Jastrow, M. (Junr.) 


Jennings 
Jensen 
Jeremias, A. 
Jerome 


John of Dame 


196 ff., 201 


156, 195, 203, 224, 232, 234 
26, 29, 36 ff., 48 


745 146 
2 35 
39> 42; 63 


Josephus 72, 79, 130, ἀπῇ ξεν ἀξιῶ, 
182, 190, 193, 245 
Jost δὰ Pee : 180 
Julian of Bene 324 
Justin Martyr 163, 231, 275 ff. 
Kabisch ae 221, 226, 254 
Kant Ὁ; BO 
Kautzsch 8, 18, aki Tia 196: 196, 
202, 221 
Keane 78 
Keary a4. 
Keil 63 
King 31 72 
Kittel ean ai ae 8 
Kohler 151, 158, 163, 175, 178, 179, 
ΤΟΙ 195 
Kohnt ΒΒ 5) 55. 5 
Konig 27> 49 
Kraetzschmar 63 
Kremer 28 
Kropotkin Ne Gy 
Kuenen 196, 202, 221 
Kuhn 47, 52, 85 
Lagarde 115 
Lajard 58 


PAGE 
Lang ΓΗ ἊΝ ἀπὸ ΡΥ hes 
| Lange oe 253, 256 
Lenormant 8, 29, 33) 34) 44) 49, 53: 
55» 60, 77 
Leontius Byzantinus ae be nea 77 
Lévi ee ΞΕ nae ΠΝ ΠΤ 
Liltmann ... sb = Porn Ot 
Lincke ... ἘΝ ve em yet 
Lipsius 254, 266 
Lods 182 ff. 
Loisy 10, 18, Τὸ; 201, 205 
Loofs Sp tie ἘΣ Ἐς ἘΜ: 
Lowe are is τ 
Lubbock, Sir J. =e ΠΝ 7 
| Luther... τῇ Ἢ peel St 
Mackenzie ae ἊΝ Ἐπ Τὰ: 
Δ τ. ΤΣ re races Ob Aa 
Mahly ae τοῦ ἘΣ ἐς ΣΎ ye 
Maimonides Se ait ef a 
Malan ea 200; 2132") 255 
Mangey ... ay ee cae Id 
Margoliouth LIS El 4 
Martensen or αὶ ΠΡ 89 
Martin, Rey nds 110. 172 
Maspero 34» 35 42) 44, 65 
Massey... ae be Eye 
Max Miiller, F. ... =a 59, 78 
Max Miiller, W. 26, 51, 11: 74 
Methodius 247, 300 Nl, 322 
Meyer on πὸ oe τς Τοῦ 
Mills ae, ἐς ee ἡ ὦ 
Montefiore ‘8, τὸ} 147, 148, 180 
Morfill : πὸ I43, 180, 204, 209 
Moulton ... 7 ye ἜΤ S 
Movers __... ne he OS 
Neander ἜΠΟΣ, 90. 9420 335 
Nestle is oo Pe: Sate 
Nicolas... ae +f ae Π2 
Noldeke 26, 28 
Debierauaer: er aa OS 
Oldenberg 40 ΤῚ 


Origen 133, νος Ἢ ΤΥ ror 296 ff., 
310, 318, 320 ff., 325, 344 


Orr Εν et ἮΝ ΡΝ Begs: 

Osiander ... axe is ΠΝ 125 

Otto is a % Ἢ ΤΟΣ 
4353 


359 Index of Authors 


PAGE 
Panaetius ... + δ ὙΠ ΠΥ 
Pelagius ... sr ate 298, 326 
Pererius . τι ti me ES 
Pfleiderer, O. so 253, 256, 266 
Pherecydes of Syros ays Ble il 
Phillips# sey ae ate te: aeRO 
Philo Byblus Ἂς 32} 21: 05 


Philo Judaeus 58, 81, 129, 131 ff., 149, 
183, 0102%, 121Π| 57, 250, 278, 251; 


285, 293 f., 297, 304 
Pinches ... pe a7 ead, 00. 110 
Plato ΤῊΣ 87; 143, 149, 297, 304 
Plutarch ... ἀκ NY REL: 
Polycarp ... Ape ὍΣ 


Porter 98103, 114, ΥΩ eh 143, 148, 
170, 171, 174, 177, 215, 222, 226, 271 


Pretleraa,, i ate 32, 52 
Rabbi Abba b. Kahana ... Slee 
Abn 5: ἊΣ ee 155 
ἈΠ oa ἮΝ Pew, «DAY | 
Akiba ... οὐ 149, 162, 175 
Ammi ... Pe 1515 162 f.7164 
Asi εἰς ΜΗ ie acd He: 
Chanina oe τῶν ἀνὰ 
Chanina b. Wee iA ae L023 
Chayim Vital ... ny ρος ἡδὺ 
David of Roccamartica eID 
Eleazar b. Azariah_... roe IG ἢ 
(b. Jose) =... ΤᾺ θα. ἀνὴρ 
Deb edatn mares <P ΠΡ TOU! 
Elieser b. Hirkanos 40, 158, 163, 
231 
Hoschaia 6 ve 152, 153 
Ibo SAC sf rer sO 
Jehuda b. ει τῖγας: ἂν τῷ at TY: 
bs Simons; τ τ 
Ὁ: Γπεηα. πὰ τον ΤΙ 
Jirmeja b. Eleazar_... bau 50 
Jochanan "Ὁ. Chanina ... 155 
Jose rea ed BO, 57; 108: rae 173 
b. Chalastha soe eae 9 
Joshua b. Karcha at ἴων μεν 
b. Levi Rs "δ τεῦ 
Levi --- ἜΣ sat τε 
Mar Ukba δὴν ry re 
Mayer b. Gabbai πο ἘΠ: ἩῆΣ 
Meir gu. ue oes 
Mosche of iene ti το 


PAGE 
Rabbi Nachman b. Chisda ero 
acca a. on ΠῚ ΕΕ 
Samuel Ὁ. Nachman ah per rt 
Shemtob 4 ae aoe FOS 
Simon ... ie He 150, 160 
b. Eleazar_... aT 164, 165 
b. Lakisch ... sce See 0G 
Rabiger ... i aoe ee ἐν 
ἐφ εν τος ner me Γάδ! 
Ranch qa aie ee Pes a2 
Rawlinson Ὁ Sra er 417 
Redslob _... a ney 55 
Rekanati, Menahem ὁ... ἐν Uy, 
Renan oA ἘΠ πε ΠΣ ΠΣ tO 
Renouf ... ὩΣ: τὸ ors ats 
Reuss es ar ay: ois SD 
Réville ... age ret 78, 86 
Ritschl ... oe oo ay ite 
Rodkinson re ve a. Blas 
Romanes ... ret re ΙΝ 
Ronsch _... He ἐπὶ ΤΟΙ 
Rosenthal ... rhe ri Tae res: 
Rothe x a Ἐν ΤΙ 
Rousseau ... Ay Ἐξ ἜΚ ΘΕ 
Ryle se : τς er te. 
Ryssel 1009, 114, 115, 202, 203, 212; 
221 


Sanday and Headlam 253 ff., 260, 261, 


264 
Saussaye, De la ... pe 44, 87 
Sayce Ae 37, 43 ff., 47, 49, 60 


Schechter 108, 109, 114, 148, 160 ff., 
166, 170, 171, 180 


Schiefer 4... Ay “Ἐξ 530 
Schiller... ἘΣ πῆς ae 8 
Schiller-Szinessy ... os τ rAG 
Schoettgen a ag pees 40 


Schrader ... cae rie Wael fer 4 15740 
Schultz ae εν ΡΟ ΟἹ, ΟΝ, OS 


Schultze ... aoe apt: Pert: | 
Schiirer 109, 122, 142, 145, 155, 180, 

195, 221 
Schwane ... δ ἐξ rays 
Siegfried... hy 142, 250, 339 
Singers: vay ἫΠ ceo? 
Smend.... τ ESS LeeT O 


Smith, W. Reece 5, 8, 18, 19, 26 ff, 
33: 65, 68, 79) 87, 95; 182 


ee ee eee eee ee ee ee ΕΥ 


Socin 


South, Bp 


Spiegel 
Sprenger 
Spurrell 
Squiers 
Stade 
Stanton 
Stave 
Steffens 
Stevens 
Stout 
Swete 


Syncellus ... 


Tatian 


[Index of Authors 


oa 


168, 253, 


278 ff., 


aylor) 105;.5 132 fh 1 


Tennant 
Tertullian 


79, 85, 


. 96, 129, 188 


18 

[30 

es auite 
27 

ὃ. ΤΟ 25 
Boe 74 
18, 40 
146, 180 


88 


257, 202, 211 


᾽ εἶ 


283, 284, 288 


148, 149, 169, 


250 


207,272, 345 
150, 247) 274, 295, 300, 


328 ff, 344 


Thackeray 160, 197, 208, 209, 214, 221, 
247, 250, 251, 258 
Theodore of Mopsuestia 


Theophilus of Antioch 280 ff., 286, 288 


Thilo 
Tholuck 
Tiele 


‘Tischendorf 


Torrey 


‘Tottermann we 
Toy 16, 19, 20. ΟΣ: 12 


178, 180, 


195, 196, 205 


, 109, ΤΟ; 254 


Baan a2, 


234 

165, 167 
55, 56 
196 


232 


399 


Trumbull ... ae 160 
Turmel 295, 318, 335 
Tyler IIO, 114 
Tylor 78, 87 
Usener aan: a oy Las ANTS 
Ussher 151 
Wake 74 


Weber, F. (Author of Jiid. Theo- 
logie) 147, 150 f., 155, 156, 159 ff, 
167, 180, 184, 197, 259 


Weber (Author of Jdtsche Studien) 56 
Weber, O. (In Der Alte Ortent) 25 
Weinstein ... ἊΝ rn ee 42 
Weizsacker Ae 253, 266 
W ellhausen ἘΠῚ δ᾽ ΤΠ 1 Ὶ13 ἢν; 20 
Με... ΠΝ 270: 1285) ΟΝ 
West 56 
Wiedemann 35 
Windischmann ... Pets bps 55 
Winter and Wiinsche eer s 7 
Worcester... 8, 18, 37, 40, 41 
Wright vr 152 
Wiinsche .. Pok4GfteR gOS ei OG 
Zeller 129, 142 
Zeno 331,332 
Zimmern .. 315 37: 30545049 
Zockler Ey a7 
Zunz 145, 150, 159, 196 


DINGO BX ©) eS ἢ 


PAGE 
Adam as representative or sum of 


the race 166, 256 ff., 261 ΠῚ 28r, 
25. ΠΡ 404 ΤΟΣ 214. ΤῚΣ] 
332, 338. 342 
Adam, books of .. 195 ff 
aoe 38, heen 
Agriculture, see en Fall-story 
Allegorical interpretation of Fall- 


story 80 ff., 136, 255, 297, 302, 318 
Allegory ; 81 
Amoraim 145 ead plier in Ch. VII. 


Angels, Descent of, see Watchers 
Ἂς sx) | Go) aoe a 1831 185, and see 
Satan, Fall of 


Apocalyptic literature, see Pseudepi- | 


graphic literature 
Apocalypse of Abraham... 


Peetu 
τ » Baruch (Greek) ... © 202 
i acs ps (Syriac) ΤΙ ft 
“e », Noah 189 
Apologists e275 ΠῚ ΔΒ. 
Arabia, Arabs a5, 20 f., 71, 73 f. 
Aruru : 30 
Assumption of Mores 195 
Athenagoras 282 
Avesta Ae . 54 ff. 
Azazel 182 ΠῚ passim in Ch. VIll. 
Baal-land . : ἘΠΕ 71: 
Babylonian Τὰς ane to Fall- 
story 36 ff., 346 


Baptism in relation to Original Sin 277, 


290, 294 f., 299 ff., 316, 319, 322, 

328, 334 f., 336 f. 
Beena marriage 
Buddha, tree of 


26 
59 


PAGE 

Bundahesch £25798 20, 159 
Canaanites, influence on the He- 

brews of 


31; 75 

Death, doctrine concerning, 
in Old Test. ΤΠ: 
Ecclus. 119 ff. 
Wisdom 123 ff. 
Philo... i 135 ff. 
Rabbinic literature 161 ff. 
Slav. Enoch... 142, 207 
Test. of Abraham 195 
Apoc. of Moses 198 
3 4, Baruch 214 
4 Ezra ne : 224 
Christian ΤΉΝ 2 me ff. 


Jewish literature as a whole 244 
S. Paul 253 ff. 
Justin Martyr 2970 1. 
Tatian : 278 f. 
Clement of A Teeere 294 
Methodius : 309 
Cyril of Jerusalem ... 315 f. 
Basil .. 317 
SS of Nyce 321 
Chrysostom ... 325 f. 
Theodore of τ οτος 327 


Devil, see Satan 


Dona Superaddita 280, 284, 311 


Ea oe a aes 44. 1. 75 
Eabani, legend of fea tee PEs 74 


Ecclesiasticus, date, value etc. of 
107 f. 


[Index of Subjects 


PAGE 


Eden (Paradise) 18, 26 f., 37 ff., 63, 
64 ff. τὰ ,,ὅ5) MOB 1559 186 if 346 
Egyptian legends related to Fall- 


story 5, ΠΣ 
Elohim-beings τ 27, 96 
Enoch, Book of Pane r8r ff. 


yy (olavonic) 142 ΠΣ 204 ff. 


Eridu ἜΘ ΤΠ 75. 110 
2 Esdras or 4 Ezra, date, author- 

ship etc. of 220 ff. 231 f. 
Etana = : Srey rh 


Eee τ δῆτ, ΤῸ ΤΠ} 141: 152 
L571 170. τοῦ 100; 2Ol. 274 
.» etymology of 17,120 


Fall, the, effectson Nature of, 127, 150 f., 
103, 07. 205 tee tila 20} 
Fall, theory of pre-mundane or 


anté-natal;. 15, 2G76)., 318,.320.4. 
Fall and Original Sin, doctrine of 
in Jahvist writing 56: ΠΟ ΤΙ 
Old Test. 104 f. 
Ecclus. ΠΕ ΠΣ 
Wisdom 129 ff. 
Philo 3: 136, 140 ff. 
3 and 4 Macc. ve Ee 
Rabbinic writings 157 f., 161 ff., 
167 its "ἘΣ 
Book of Enoch ἽΝ δ, ἀπὸ 
Apoc. of Moses 198 f. 


Fragmentsof Adam-literature 202 


Slav. Enoch ... Ws 209 f. 
Apoc. of Baruch 215 ff. 
4 Ezra sgh az4 ff., 228 ff. 
Jew. literature asa whole Ch. x. 
Gospels and Epistles 248, 271 
S. Paul (Rom.) 251 ff. 
Justin Martyr ἀν 2175 ἢ 
Tatian ; δ 278 f. 
Theophilus fi Mntech 280 ff, 
Trenaeus 285 ff., 291 
Clement of Alexandria 291 ἢ 
Origen “οὐ ff. 
Methodius 309 f. 
Athanasius 311 ff. 
Basil . 316 ff. 
cote of patibs 318 f. 


Gregory of Nyssa... 320 ff. 


PAGE 
Fall and Original Sin, doctrine of 

in Chrysostom Ape 325 fff. 
Theodore of Mopsuestia 27 i 
Tertullian... hg 328 ff. 
Cyprian 336 f 
Hilary 5.71. 
Ambrose 339 ff. 
Augustine 343 and passin 


Fall and Original Sin, growth of 
doctrine of 238 ff. (see also Ch. 
IV.) 273 ff., 282 ff., 291, 307, 323 f., 
328 ff., 338, 343 ff. 

Fall-story, allegorical interpreta- 


tion of 8o ff., 136, 255 
Date of... ἐμ fe Veeck 
Exepesis of6 7... ae eget 
‘ Inspiration’ of 85, 87 f 
Literary criticism of 16 ff 


Ἢ style of bia sets. i: 
Oral tradition of z ΤΣ ΊΩ tes 
Original significance of 68 ff., 74 ff. 
Use of, in Old Test. 00 It. 

in P seudepigrapha 2 36 ff. etc. 


Variants off) 4. are ORE. 
Non-historical . ΠΥ Ἢ: 
In what sense mythical Sanit. 
Contains no doctrine of Ouewal 

IT esa Pi ae feet OQ 
Traces of nomadic Hebrew 

tradition in ... ἷς 24-30 
Its reference to ἘΠ τς ΤΑΣ 30 
Its connexion with abuse of the 

vine ... : ᾿ t25c. 


Its connexion “ei the sexual 
relation 40 ΠΡ 67 f., 69 ΠῚ 144, 
Pete et kOud., 260; 30% ἢ 807, 
ROG. AT, πὶ 

First man, legend of, 


bet fale malo nn ay Wren Y-l, 
Ezek. se at ΒΕ 65: 
Philo ... : ΕἾ ΠΟΘΙ: 
Talmud ist τ 149 f. 
S. Paul a pa SeSY 

Flesh 102, 268 ff., 290 
Gadreel 183, 189 f. 


Garden of Eden, see Eden 
ros, Krods oF the gods 9-27," 10. 53 
Gilgamesh, epic of ' 


362 


PAGE 

Gnostic legends or doctrines 159, 278, 

283, 292 

Golden Age me 50,05 951051. 

Good and Evil, meaning of 12 ff., 414 
Greek legends, related to the Fall- 

story cea Lite 


Guilt, Original, see ΕΠ] Guilt 


Haggada, definition of 109, 145, 148 


Haoma 57, 68 
Hebrews, early ΠΥ and reli- 
gion of.. ee “ah eV 


Hereditary Sane 102 fi "ΤΟ, 140 bey 
BO94., 3040317 1, 310 ft., 220,022 Ue, 


338 

Hesperides, garden of ... ἐπ t | 

Hima Ris 27 
Hindu legend Mintek to Fall- 

story ors 59 f. 


Image of God 104, 113, 148 f., 284 f., 
287 f., 336, 339 

Inborn sin, see Sinfulness, inherent 
Indian legend, see Hindu legend 
Inspiration of Fall-story, see Fall-story 
Iranian legends related to Fall- 

story Oy ΘΖ 
Izdubar, see Cieamect 


Jahveh, delineation ofinJ 4 f., τα ff. 
Jahvist Document or Writer (J) 3 ff., 
19, 68, 75, 79, 95 f 


Jinn ; 28 
Jubilees, Book ae. bes sf ff. 
Ladon ace τῶι τ: το ἜΣ 
Maschiana ee nat 3 ines Ὁ 
Maschya ... ras 58 
Matriarchate, see Mothers ἀρελθος 

Mishna ... Ae a PF 
Mother-descent ... a Pte ae 1 
Oannes: =... ose 


Original Guilt oe 301, AE B44 45 
Original Sin, see Fall and Original Sin 
Original state of man 
in the Jahvist writing ... ὉΠ’ 
Philo ... 1531 


[ndex of Subjects 


PAGE 
Original state of man 


in Rabbinical literature 149 ff. 
Adam-literature .... eis, 
Slavonic Enoch 207 f. 
Apoc. of Baruch 215. 
Jewish literature as a whole 242 ff. 


S. Paul er fe sos ©2790 
Justin Martyr Xe ey 
Tatian ᾿ aaa re 
Theophilus of Anneen τσ δ 
Irenaeus εἰς τ 580 
Clement of Aleraudi oo ξ 
Athanasius ... ἐς So ERA 
Basil . 2 ay τὸ 
ἜΝ οἵ Nyse 320 f. 
Ambrose 338 f. 


Original state, duration of the 151, 243 


Pahlavi translation of Avesta ... 56 
Pandora : ὙΠ 21: 
Paradise, see ot 
Paul, S., relation to Jewish or 

Hellenic thought 250 and fasszm in 

Lies : 
Persian legend, see Iranian legend 


Phallicism 68 
Phoenician influence on ἀτρτ ον: 
culture ... Ae gi PA EY 
Phoenician legends related to 
Fall-story Pie yi tee 
Prometheus 7 52. δ. 02,0051. 
Psalms of Solomon a sae haope 
Pseudepigraphic literature, origin, 
nature etc. of ἘΠ Η: 
Pseudo-Philo a5 a ΣΤΟΝ 


Recapitulation-doctrine 288 ff., 309, 344 


Samael . 152, 158, 195, 203 

Satan ΟΣ 43, 104, 0 Ll, mils 128 1 

143, 152 ff., 184, 188, 192, 197, 

20055232, ff. 547: 255, 215 ἴοι 

Envy of 152 ff., 196, 199, 200, 201, 

207, 237, 246 £, 316 

Fall of 193, 199, 200, 201, 206, 238, 

246 

Satanails &.. =f 4.200 
Seal, ΠΟ τς ἘΣ ππονηοτ 

representation of the Fall ... 48 

Semjaza 182 and Passi in Ch. VIII. 


Index of Subjects 


Serpent, the, or serpent 28, 33, 41, 43, 
Mt asedG ey tell (O40 110; 1524 187: 
ΤῸ ΤΠ 290. 201,203, 232. Π|; 
1: ees hate) 49 202 εἰς: 


Serpent symbolism Bart, 
Sin, conception of 
in Jahvist writing "ἐς OT 
Old Test. 99 ff. 
Ecclus. a ne ΠΟ τί 
Philo... oe {515} 
Slav. Enoch... τ: ἀ GEE 
Sin, universality of 
in Jahvist writing 10, 98 ἢ 
Old Test. 100 ff. 
4 Ezra ΕΝ oe aye: 
New Test. ... Εἰς Ὁ" 
Fathers 275) 315 


Sinful disposition 

Sinfulness, inherent or inborn 97 f., 
rol fi., 144,215, 203 fl., 275, 2090: ff., 
319, 326, 332 ff., 340 ff. 

Sirens ἘΣ ἐπ ie 

Siva an ἘΣ ἐπε καρ ἐκ 

Solidarity, organic or moral, of 
mankind 99 f., 161 ff., 209 f., 215 f., 
217 ἢ: 228 fi., 250 th, 281, 207, 214; 
315, 338, 342 

Soma 


ae a bees te, 

Souls, fall of, see Fall, premundane 

Stoic Philosophy, the source of 
traducianism 330 ff. 


303 


Talmud, nature, date etc. of ... 145 f. 

Tannaim [45 and fass7m in Ch. VII. 

Targums ... os 145 f. 

Tempter, see esp. p. 245 ff.; see also 
Gadreel, Satan etc. 

Testament of Abraham, nature 


and date of τὰ oe ἽΝ 105 

Testament of ΧΙἠῚ Patriarchs, 
nature and date of ... eae tGO 
aries a a RTF bs: 
Traducianism 175, 294, 329 ff., 337, 
340 


Tree of knowledge 12 ff., 18, 29, 44, 
SOR et Lovet sae tt, 010,13 32.) 2475 
340 

Tree of Life 18, 44, 49, 66 ff., 91, 118, 


187, 247, 249, 346 
Unfallen state, see Original state 


Vedas 45 
Vivanghat (Vivasvant) 


cn 
\O 
= 


on 
σι 


Watchers, legend of the 94 ff., 181 ff., 
188, 190 ff., 206 f., 212 f., 223, 236 ff. 
Yama τς ΠΕ ΜΠ: 
Yezer or yezer hara 98, 103, 113 ff., 
Tae eres lOO the, 0207, 225 [τ 27% 


Lee ne Stele MAE τς Chg iE 


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